Harm Henrick Kamerlingh Onnes

Harm Henrick Kamerlingh Onnes (1893 –1985) was a Dutch portrait painter and ceramist who also produced designs for stamps and stained-glass windows. He is best known for the small, humorous vignettes of everyday life.

Self Portrait

In his early years from 1915 to 1925 his work was influenced by modernism. In 1918 he designed a number of abstract stained-glass windows for the Spark House, which was designed by Jacobus Oud. From 1925, he started to take the everyday reality as his subject, and from that time he only made figurative works.

Farmer by the Fire 

It was after a visit to the studio of Mondrian, that he had realized that abstract art was not for him. Some of his designs for stained-glass windows have discoveries of physicists Pieter Zeeman and Hendrik Lorentz as a subject. One of these stained-glass windows contained a portrait of Hendrik Lorentz and formulas devised by him that describe the behavior of electrons. Other stained-glass windows show the instruments to measure the splitting of spectral lines of atoms under the influence of a magnetic field is measured, the so-called Zeeman effect. He also made portraits of the physicists Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest.

The found object

Harm Kamerlingh Onnes characterized his artistic work with the phrase "just messing around".

The gardeners of Endegeest