Sold Watercolour by Harm Kamerlingh Onnes 

Puppet Show

Watercolour

signed l.r

10*10 inch (22,5 * 22,5 cm)

Framed behind glas: 13,5*14 inch (35,5*34,5 cm)

Biography Harm Kamerlingh Onnes

The painter Kamerlingh Onnes  (Zoeterwoude 1893 - Leiden 1985) made drawings, watercolors, gouaches, oil paintings and ceramics. He also made stamps and (abstract) stained glass windows on commission. He is best known for the small, humorous character sketches of everyday life, such as this depiction of a puppet theater.

In the period 1915 to 1925, his work was influenced by modernism through encounters with Theo van Doesburg. He participated in expressionist and pointillist exhibition of the Sphinx. During that time, he collaborated with many artists, including van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and his father on villa Allegonda, a house in the famous style of the architect Oud. From 1925, however, everyday reality is his subject. From that moment on, his work is exclusively figurative. Partly due to a visit to Mondriaan's studio, he realized that abstract art was not for him.

His father Menso was also an artist, especially of still lifes, in 1911 he gave his son permission to develop as an artist. His uncle was the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. So it could be that he was making music or eating with Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest. Harm himself played piano and cello. He put his artistry into perspective with the words 'to mess with' and therefore made his art without theoretical foundations. He ultimately found the human motive more important than the form. He has become a storyteller who likes to make observations in perspective. He was a member of the Independents, Pulchri, Contour in Delft, a.o..