Cornelis Hoogendijk

Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866 – 1911) was a Dutch art collector. Hoogendijk was born in Krimpen aan den IJssel as the third of six children, and studied law at Leiden University before entering the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 1891. One older brother had died before he was born, and his mother died a year after his youngest sister Riet was born in 1874. The death of his remaining older brother when he was only nine left a lasting impression, and when his father died in 1883, Cornelis became the head of the family at age 17. In 1885 his sister Wilhelmina married the lawyer Ferdinand Kranenburg and moved to Amsterdam. The two younger sisters moved with him to the The Hague after he purchased 365 Bezuidenhoutseweg in 1898 and old catalogs reflect he began to purchase art in 1889. In the years 1890-1899 he built up an enormous collection of paintings, financed with the fortune he had inherited, as well as income from mortgages he had sold locally. Of his three sisters, Riet shared his interest in art and she also entered the Rijksakademie in 1889, where she became a painter and met her future husband, the painter Gerrit Willem van Blaaderen, whom she married in 1905. Through their common interest, the Hoogendijk collection became well-known by the turn of the century, but suffered a severe setback when Cornelis experienced a psychosis in 1900 during a trip to Paris, where he had an apartment at 59 rue Blanche. Removing collection from The Hague to Amsterdam After returning to the Hague he saw a doctor and was sent to the top psychiatric center Veldwijk in Ermelo in February, where at first everyone thought he would make a recovery. However, in 1902 his brother-in-law Ferdinand Kranenburg started acting as family spokesperson, and with an eye towards the sisters' future without their brother, had 365 Bezuidenhoutseweg appraised. Hofstede de Groot made a list of 427 works spread throughout the house. After Riet's marriage in 1905 the house in the Hague, still overflowing with art, needed to be emptied as it was too big for their sister Johanna to live in alone. Towards the end of 1906 a Riet and Ferdinand selected a large amount of art to loan to the Rijksmuseum, where the works were gladly received and catalogued by the director Barthold van Riemsdijk. The couple Blaaderen-Hoogendijk commissioned the architect Karel de Bazel to build a new villa for them in Huizen and left for a honeymoon to Italy.