Merchant; art critic, poet; professor at the Amsterdam Rijksacademie, 1876-1889; central figure in the emancipation process of the Roman Catholics of the Netherlands. Alberdingk Thijm received no higher education. He initially went into business. In 1842 he began writing art criticism for De Spectator. He married Wilhelmina Anna Sophia Kerst in 1846. In 1852 he founded the Volks-almanak voor Nederlandse katholieken (The People's Almanac for Dutch Catholics), and in 1855 the Catholic periodical Dietsche Warande.

Assistant-director of the Print Room of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum (1913-1920); specialist in early Dutch graphic art and painting; art seller. Beets was born in Batavia, Indonesia which is present-day Jakarta. He was the only child of Dirk Beets and Clara Johanna van de Poll, and the grandson of the Dutch writer and poet Nicolaas Beets (1814-1903). He was raised in Batavia, then the capital of the Netherlands Indies. At the age of eight, he was sent to his mother's family in The Netherlands, in Driebergen.

Print collector, medical doctor; surgeon. Bierens de Haan was the son of David Bierens de Haan, professor of mathematics and physics at Leiden University, and Johanna Catharina Justina IJssel de Schepper. The young Bierens de Haan attended the Leiden gymnasium and, from 1887 to 1894, he studied medicine at Leiden University. He also received training in hospitals and universities abroad, in particular in Bonn, Vienna, Paris, and London. In those years he began building up his print collection, while visiting the European print rooms.

Director of the Mauritshuis museum, 1889-1909, connoisseur and art collector. Bredius was raised in a wealthy family. His father was Johannes Jacobus Bredius a director of a powder factory in Amsterdam. His family collected Chinese porcelain and 17th-century Dutch paintings, which Bredius would build upon. His mother died when he was only ten. Early in his career, he intended to become a concert pianist, but realized after three years of study that he would never become an outstanding musician.

art critic; director of the Groninger Museum (1955-1963); chief curator of the Gemeentemuseum The Hague (1963-1965). Between age five and ten, de Gruyter lived in the Dutch East Indies. His father then served in the Koninklijke Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij. In 1909 he quit this position to become an independent writer and he moved with his family to Haarlem, in the Netherlands. During the next four years, the young de Gruyter continued his primary and secondary school education.

Professor of the History of Pre-Classical Antiquity at the University of London, 1949-1954. Frankfort was the eldest son of a Jewish mercantile family. Expected to inherit and run the family business, he was educated at the Hogere Burger School, a commercial high school, instead of the humanities-centered Barlaeus Gymnasium. Friends at the Barlaeus Gymnasium recognized his brilliance, however, and convinced his father to allow him to pursue a university career instead. Frankfurt studied initially Greek at the University of Amsterdam.

Netherlandish art scholar and director Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Friedländer was the son of Leopold Friedländer (1832-ca.1880), a Berlin banker, and Helene Noether (Friedländer) (1843-after 1901). He began studying art history in 1891 in Munich, continuing in Florence (under August Schmarsow, and ultimately Leipzig, writing a dissertation on Albrecht Altdorfer under Anton Springer.

Rembrandt specialist; director Amsterdam Historical Museum. Haak was the son of Jurrian Haak and Henrietta van Eek. He attended the Amsterdam Montessori Lyceum between 1938 and 1944. In 1950 he married Annette van Heek. Between 1950 and 1954, he served as assistant to the art dealer D. A. Hoogendijk in Amsterdam. In 1954 Haak began his museum career as assistant in the department of paintings at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. In 1963, he obtained the position of chief curator at the Amsterdam Historical Museum, of which he was appointed director in 1975.

Cataloger of major corpus of Renaissance and Baroque prints. Hollstein was a major dealer in prints and drawings in Berlin before World War II. With the Nazi's rise to power in Germany, Hollstein, a Jew, was forced to take refuge in Amsterdam. He was given a permanent seat in the print room (Rijksprentenkabinet) of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, where he set about compiling an index and catalog of known examples of prints. He based his corpus on examples from the collection and his own extensive knowledge and business notes.

Art writer, painter, draughtsman, engraver, book illustrator. At the age of nine, Houbraken became an assistant in the shop of the Dordrecht merchant in twine, Johannes de Haan. His patron, being himself trained in painting by Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693), gave the young boy the opportunity to copy drawings and prints. In 1672, Houbraken began his apprenticeship as a painter, first for a short time as a pupil of the landscape painter Willem van Drielenburch (c. 1625-after 1677). In 673-1674, he spent nine months in the studio of the portraitist Jacobus Levecq (1634-1675).

Writer of a dictionary of Dutch and Flemish artists; art and book dealer; publisher and poet. Immerzeel was the third son of Johannes Immerzeel, a merchant in food, and Elizabet Steenbus. In his youth, Immerzeel studied drawing and painting with Pieter Hofman (1755-1837), but he had to give up this vocation because of his weak eyes. A self-educated man, he spoke several languages and dedicated himself to music and poetry. In 1795, he served as secretary to the court martial of Dordrecht.

Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art. Jaffé was born of Jewish parents in Frankfurt am Main. In 1933, he left Nazi Germany and immigrated to The Netherlands. Shortly before, he had finished high school at the Goethe Gymnasium in Frankfurt. The same year he began studying art history at the University of Amsterdam. Among his teachers was Ferrand Whaley Hudig (1883-1937) who died the year Jaffé finished his study under the supervision of I. Q. van Regteren Altena.

Director of the Rijksbureau voor de Monumentenzorg. Kalf attended the Gymnasium in Amsterdam. Already in his high school period he wrote critical articles on art. Inspired by his father, Martinus Kalf (1847-1898), the editor of the Algemeen Handelsblad, he was interested in literature, including plays, architecture, and arts and crafts. Between 1892 and 1896, Kalf studied Dutch literature and art history at the University of Amsterdam. He frequently published in various periodicals, often displaying a polemic attitude to the cultural and religious climate of his day.

Self educated art historian specializing in Dutch art of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Knoef spent his short life in Amsterdam, where he attended, between 1911 and 1915, the Normaalschool with the view to becoming a school teacher. However, after his time of duty in the army, he found employment in a library, where he began collecting reproductions of art culled from old periodicals. After this short period, he became an employee of the Dutch Railways in 1919.

Goya scholar and academic museum director; co-founder of the committee to rescue works of art ravaged by the floods in Florence in 1966. Licht's father was Austrian, Arnold Berman Licht (b. 1889), a raincoat manufacturer working in the Amsterdam at the time of his son's birth. He and his family lived in Berlin. As tensions against Jews mounted in Germany, Licht's family left Berlin two weeks before Kristallnacht for Amsterdam. He fled again to Paris and in 1941 to Genoa, Italy. Denied entrance to the United States, Licht, alone, emigrated to Panama in 1941 at age 13 and then to New York.

Art collector, cataloger and connoisseur of Netherlandish drawings and prints. Lugt began his career at age twelve in 1899 when he constructed a catalog of the print collection in Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam. By age fifteen, he had written a biography of Rembrandt, illustrated with photographic reproductions and with his own copies of etchings and drawings by Rembrandt (published 1997, Fondation Custodia). Lugt cut short his formal education to become an employee at the auction house Frederik Muller in Amsterdam in 1901.

Director of the Amsterdam Print Room between 1903 and 1912. After having attended the Gymnasium in Amsterdam, Moes enrolled as a law student at the University of Amsterdam, but after one year he switched to the faculty of arts. He founded Clio, an association of history students who started collecting objects related to the university's history. Without having completed his studies, he became, in 1885, a volunteer at the auction house Frederik Muller in Amsterdam.

Print cataloger. He and Jan Frederik van Someren (1852-1930) wrote a catalog of engraved portraits beginning in 1888. The professor of Art History at Utrecht University, J. G. van Gelder, described Muller's work as one of the praiseworthy graphic studies of Netherlandish of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Archivist and librarian; director of Museum Boijmans at Rotterdam; first chief director of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. Obreen was trained to become a businessman, but due to his interest in art and history he was appointed as an assistant librarian and archivist of the city of Rotterdam. The archive was housed in the Gemeenlandshuis van Schieland, along with the galleries of Museum Boijmans. In co-operation with the archivist Johannes H. Scheffer (1832-1886) he published sources on the history of Rotterdam: Rotterdamsche historiebladen.

Professor of esthetics, art history and modern languages at Amsterdam University, 1877-1895. His parents were adherents of the Protestant Réveil Movement of the Jewish convert Isaac Da Costa (1798-1869). Under the influence of this ethical ideology Pierson began his theology study at Utrecht University in 1849. In 1854 he obtained his doctoral degree with his dissertation, Disquisitio historico-dogmatica de Realismo et Nominalismo. The next ten years he served in Louvain and subsequently in Rotterdam as a minister.

Connoisseur of drawings, curator of various print rooms, professor of art history. Van Regteren Altena studied at the Academy for Visual Arts at Amsterdam and spent two years in Italy, intending to be a painter. Visits to Raimond van Marle in Perugia and G. J. Hoogewerff in Rome changed his mind to art history. Upon his return in The Netherlands, he became an assistant of Frits Lugt, who was commissioned to compile the inventory of Dutch and Flemish drawings in the Louvre.

Director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam between 1936 and 1945, and director-in-chief of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, 1945-1959. Röell attended the Gymnasium in Leiden and The Hague. Between 1913 and 1919, he studied law and art history at Utrecht University. In 1919, he went to Paris, where he continued his art history study at the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre. However, he did not complete his dissertation, when F.

Co-founder with Adrianus Daniël de Vries of the art periodical Oud Holland, 1883. De Roever was the son of Andries de Roever and Anna Maria Louise Elisabeth Kluytenaar. After his primary education, he served, from 1867 to 1869, at the office of notary A. A. J. Schouten. Between 1871 and 1877 he studied law, first at the Athenaeum Illustre in Amsterdam (the predecessor of the University of Amsterdam), where met a fellow pre-law student Adrianus Daniël de Vries.

Typographer; designer; director Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum (1945-1962). Sandberg grew up in Amersfoort and, from 1904, in Assen, where he attended the Gymnasium. His father had a governmental function as Registrar of the Province of Drenthe. During World War I he did his military service (The Netherlands remained neutral) and subsequently he moved to Amsterdam in 1919. For a short time he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1920 he married Amy Frankamp (1885-1969). Following a stay in Italy he traveled to Jungborn in Germany, for a cure in a natural health sanatorium.

Museum director; poet. Schmidt-Degener attended the Gymnasium at Rotterdam. He began studying Art History in Berlin continuing his study for four years further at the Sorbonne without completing a degree. In 1908 he became the Director of the Boymans Museum at Rotterdam. At the Boymans, he reorganized the museum and changed the installations in order to give a broader overview. As a museum reformer, he played a mayor role in the Rijkscommissie voor het Museumwezen (State Commission for Museum Affairs) set up in 1919.