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The ‘Willet-Holthuysen’ Collection of Books
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2016
Abstract
The Museum Willet-Holthuysen, comprising the house and private collections of Abram Willet and his wife Louisa Holthuysen, was bequeathed to Amsterdam on the death of the latter and in 1929 became the home of the Institute of Art History of the University of Amsterdam. The collection of books, originally scattered through the house, had previously been gathered together, and although added to up until 1965 remained essentially the reference library of a 19th century collector whose special interests were the decorative arts, particularly glass and ceramics. The art historical volumes were moved with the Institute in 1961-62 and remain in the care of the Institute’s Library; they are likely to become more accessible when the Institute is rehoused once more in the near future.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 1987
References
2. Abraham Willet was the fourth child of the well-known Amsterdam physician Willet Sr, A.. and Swarts, J.E.. He married Sandrina Louisa Geertruida Holthuysen, only child of Holthuysen, P.G. and Lepaltak, S.L., in 1861. There were no children. For further biographical data on Willet and his family see Nederland’s Patriciaat, no.20, 1930, p.357–65, which gives an accurate compilation of the press-cuttings at the Genealogical Office in The Hague.Google Scholar
3. The will drawn up by Louisa Holthuysen in 1889 was executed on 1 May 1895. The bequest comprised the house with its contents and garden on 605 Herengracht, plus the stable behind it at 20 Amstelstraat and the sum of 200,000 guilders for the upkeep of the museum, the salary of the curator and the expansion of the whole collection. A published copy of the will can be found in the archives of the Institute of Art History in Amsterdam (referred to below as KHI) in the Willet-Holthuysen file.Google Scholar
4. In 1956 a change was made by Royal Decree in the provisions of the will, in order to place a series of books at the disposal of the University of Amsterdam. All the correspondence relating to the Willet collection as a loan is to be found in the above-mentioned file in the KHI archives.Google Scholar
5. The KHI possesses two copies of this catalogue, one of them annotated by Coenen. Wouter Nijhoff was responsible for the criticism of this work, which is indeed unusable.Google Scholar
6.
Coenen, F.
et. al., ‘Het Museum Willet-Holthuysen’, Woord en beeld. Geîllustreerd Maandschrift, 1896, p. 295–302; ibid, ‘Het Museum Willet-Holthuysen’, Onze Kunst, vol.1, 1902, p.88–89 (the house), p.126–134 (the collection), p. 161–173 (the collection, continued); vol.2
1903, p.202–16, (the Meissen porcelain and its imitations); vol.4, 1905, p.27–42 (the gold and silversmiths’ work). These articles are brought together in Coenen, F.
Het Museum Willet-Holthuysen, Amsterdam, 1906. Other articles are Coenen, F., ‘Het Museum Willet-Holthuysen’, Boon’s Geîllustreerd Magazijn, vol.17, 1907, p.478–489; ‘Over Delftsch aardewerk’, Elsevier’s Geîllustreerd Maandschrift, vol.34, 1907, p. 185–87 and ‘Hollandsch porcelain en Sakisische beeldjes’, ibid., vol.36, 1908, p.288–97; ‘Het Museum Willet-Holthuysen’, De Amsterdamsche Dameskroniek, 7 April 1917, p.5. On the museum’s fortieth anniversary an article appeared in the Saturday supplement of the Algemeen Handelsblad, vol.108, 3 August 1935. In addition to Coenen, J. de Vries also wrote an article on ‘Het Museum Willet-Holthuysen’, Eigen Haard, 1909, p.4–7, 29–32.Google Scholar
7. We have used the second edition published in Utrecht in 1946 with illustrations by Jan Roede. The first edition was published posthumously in 1936 following serial publication in the periodical Groot Nederland, vol.34, 1936. The latest edition, the fifth, appeared in 1974, when the Dutch broadcasting corporation AVRO put out a televised version of it. This was preceded by an English edition by Brockway, James, The House on the Canal, Leyden/London/New York, 1965 (Bibliotheca 7). For Coenen as a writer see De Engelbewaarder, vol.5, 1980, a complete number devoted to him.Google Scholar
8. In the Amsterdam City Archives (P.A. 387, 1-24) are 24 small exercise-books: nos. 1-19a are travel diaries and account books of P.G. Holthuysen, no.23 is his passport and no. 24 a poem by his wife. Nos.20, 21 and 22 are also travel diaries and these are attributed to Abraham Willet on account of the dates in them. We fully endorse the doubts about the correctness of this attribution expressed by D.G. Reeder in his Personen enfeiten áchter ‘Onpersoonlijke Herinneringen’ van Frans Coenen, 1975 (unpublished paper in the library of the Amsterdam Historical Museum).Google Scholar
9. For the genesis of the museum see
van Eeghen, I.H., ‘Het Museum Willet-Holthuysen’, Amstelodamum, vol.39, 1952, p. 81–6. Notices of the opening are to be found in, among other places, Antiek, vol.15, 1980/81, under ‘veilingnieuws’, no.5, p.5–8. In 1981 two art historians were invited to make a catalogue of all the Willet loans. Some of our information is taken from an unpublished report on this by Kaiser, W.H.M., De boekcollectie van de verzameling Willet-Holthuysen, Amsterdam, 1982 (to be found in the library of the KHI).Google Scholar
10. The professors in question were Hudzig, F.W., Regteren Altena, I.Q. van and Bruyn, J.. The lists of acquisitions of the period 1929-1965 are kept in the above-mentioned file in the KHI. Coenen’s list of acquisitions from 1896 to 1929 is lost.Google Scholar
11. Complete lists of the books returned and of those that never left the museum are to be found in the above-mentioned file in the KHI archives (they are dated 1965-1966 and 1963 respectively).Google Scholar
12. For the account of the cataloguing process by Kaiser, W.H.M.
see note 9. Other funds from which the KHI bought books were those of Beets, N., Dreesman, W., Veth, J., the Maatschappij voor Kunstnijverheid (Applied Art Society) in Haarlem and the Allard-Pierson Foundation. Willet had five book-plates (information kindly supplied by Dr. R.E.O. Ekkart, The Hague), all of which we have seen: the one most commonly found is the engraving illustrated here, which is 5 cm. in diameter. According to A. A. Vorsterman van Oijen Les dessinateurs néerlandais d’ex-libris, Arnhem, 1910, p.68, no.5) it was done by an amateur, but the person in question has not yet been identified (information kindly supplied by W.K. de Bruijn, Utrecht). The only terminus ante quern we have is 1910, the date of the publication of Vorsterman’s book, but since R. van der Meulen (Over de liefhebberij voor boeken. Voornamelijk met het oog op het boek vóór onze dagen, Leiden, 1896, p. 177) maintains that Willet did indeed possess a ‘book mark’, the book-plates were probably made during his lifetime.Google Scholar
13. The fumigation with ethylene oxide took 24 hours, after which the poisonous gas was removed by vacuum treatment with oxygen. The procedure was carried out in close consultation with the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
14.
Havard, H.
Objets d’art et de curiosité tirés des grandes collections hollandaises. Orfèverie, Ivores, faîences, émaux, & exposés à Amsterdam en 1873, Haarlem, 1873, p.28.Google Scholar
15. A small selection from the applied art collection is described in the Dutch/English guide to the museum published by the Amsterdam Historical Museum in 1981 (3rd edition).Google Scholar
16. The rare books are Amman, Jost. Im Frauenzimmer, Frankfurt a.M., 1586, and, De Bruijn, Abrahim. Omnium pene Europae, Asiae, Aphricae atque Americae gentium habitus, 1581. Periodicals which could have been present, but are not, included Proteus, Elegantia, Penelope and Euphrosyne (see Buijnsters, P.J.
Het verzamelen van boeken. Een handleiding, Utrecht, 1985, chapter 13, ‘Kostuumkunde’, especially p.143). A few numbers of Euphrosyne for 1832 do actually appear in the list of books returned in 1965 (above-mentioned file in KHI archives).Google Scholar
17. The statement that a small part of Willet’s library consisted of books collected by his father-in-law comes from Frans Coenen and appears first in De Amsterdamsche Dameskroniek, 7th April 1917. In the later literature it has simply been taken over from this source.Google Scholar
18.
Sachs, H.
Sammler und Mäzene. Zur Entwicklung des Kunstsammelns von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig, 1971, p. 158–59.Google Scholar
19.
Calov, G. ‘Museen und Sammler des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland’, Museumskunde. Fachzeitschrift herausgegeben vom Deutschen Museumsbund, vol.38, 1969, Heft 1-3 (10 Bd. der Dritten Folge), especially Chapter IX, ‘Die Kunstgewerblichen Sammlungen’, p. 170–72. See also Reitlinger, G.
The Economics of Taste. Vol. I. The Rise and Fall of Objects d’art. Prices since 1750, London, 1963, Chapter VI, ‘The Return of the Eighteenth Century. Part two: Porcelain, Tapestry and Sculpture’; especially p. 163–73.Google Scholar
20. Van der Meulen’s book is divided up according to countries. In the chapter on book collecting in France, he already recommends Brunet’s work in the first paragraph, which explains the correspondence of the categories. The passages on book collecting in the Netherlands are to be found on p. 299–339.Google Scholar
21. The term ‘Universalsammler’ comes from Donath, A.
Psychologie des Kunstsammelns, Berlin, 1920 (3rd revised edition), p.17. On the other hand Calov, op. cit. (note 19), p. 133, understands by a universal collection one ‘die Kunstgegenstände und Naturalien vereinigte’. This is not the case with Willet. Donath, ibid, p.17, sees the phenomenon of the universal collector who nonetheless concentrates on one particular field as common to all periods.Google Scholar
22.
See
De Mare, A.J.
Catalogus der gedrukte werken. Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, Vol. I, The Hague, 1938, p.659.Google Scholar