Henry van de Velde - Painter, architect, designer and art reformer
Henry van de Velde was born in Antwerp on 3 April 1863, the sixth child of a family of pharmacists. He studied painting in Antwerp and Paris from 1881 to 1885, where he came into contact with the Impressionists. He returned to Belgium in 1885 and turned to Neo-Impressionism from 1888. From 1890, he became involved with the Arts and Crafts movement in England and switched from painting to applied arts in 1892.
In 1894, he married Maria Sèthe and created his first house and interior designs in 1895. In 1896 he designed six interiors for Samuel Bing’s Galerie L’Art Nouveau in Paris, in 1897 he took part in the International Art Exhibition in Dresden with his own designs and founded his own furniture company in Brussels in 1898 and in Berlin in 1899. He moved to Berlin with his family in 1900 and came to Weimar in 1902 on behalf of the Grand Duke. Here he worked as an architect and artistic advisor to the arts and crafts sector and founded the arts and crafts seminar, which was continued as a school of arts and crafts from 1906 and closed in 1915. In 1917, during the First World War, he was forced to leave Germany as an undesirable foreigner and moved to Switzerland. From 1919-26, Henry van de Velde worked as an architect and designer for the collector and patron couple Kröller-Müller in Holland, before founding the “Belgian Bauhaus” La Cambre in Brussels in 1926. In 1933, he created designs for passenger ships and railway carriages, including for the Belgian State Railway. In 1936, construction began on the Ghent University Library and in 1937 on the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo based on van de Velde’s designs. In 1937, the Belgian Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris and in 1939 at the World Exhibition in New York were built according to his plans. In 1947, he moved back to Switzerland, from where he oversaw the completion of the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1954. Henry van de Velde died in Oberägeri on 25 October 1957, two days after completing his memoirs.
