Constant Cornelis Huijsmans
Constant Cornelis Huijsmans was a Dutch art teacher and painter, whose roots go back to the seventeenth-century Antwerp of the landscape painter Cornelis Huysmans. Paintings of the latter are to be found at the Louvre in Paris and at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Earlier generations of the Huijsmans family used to spell their family name slightly differently, as Huysmans.
Early life and family
Constant Cornelis Huijsmans was born in Breda on 1 January 1810. He was not only a painter but he was the Principal of the Art Academy in Breda as well as a teacher at the Royal Military Academy, also in Breda. He was the son of the painter and chemist Jacobus Carolus Huijsmans and Maria Elisabeth Beens. In 1854 he married Ludovica Francisca Kerstens, whose father was the owner of a successful brewery in Breda. The French author Joris-Karl Huysmans was his nephew. On the occasion of the latter's first major publication of a collection of French poems Huijsmans wrote in a letter dated 26 December 1874 to his nephew “by the way, your name in Dutch is Joris-Karel Huijsmans … you wrote which is German”.Training and early work (1828–1840)
Early years between 1828 and 1840 in Antwerp, Paris and BredaHuijsmans studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Academy of Fine Art in Paris. Initially, he specialized in romantic landscapes, but later he turned to interior scenes. Several of his sketchbooks have survived and some of his early paintings are known. In 1835 he returned home because of his father's going blind. As the eldest of eight children he took upon himself the task to support his family financially and to succeed his father who had been an art teacher at the Art Academy as well as at the Royal Military Academy, both located in Breda. In 1838 Huijsmans became close friends with Pieter Johannes Veth, his colleague at the Koninklijke Militaire Academie. Veth later became professor of Ethnology of the Dutch East Indies at the University of Leiden and the first Chairman of the Royal Netherlands Geographical Society. They kept up a correspondence until Huijsmans died in 1886. Huijsmans managed to combine both his teaching job and his painting and took part in various national exhibitions.
Art teaching career (1840–1879)
Huijsmans developed two art teaching methods and he used these methods himself in his art classes. Some institutions such as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam employed his approach as well. Huijsmans was the first in The Netherlands to dedicate himself to the professionalization of the subject of art teaching. His first art teaching method was called Het landschap, developed and published in 1840. It became a bestseller. The art dealer Vincent van Gogh subscribed to this new teaching method.In 1845 King William II of the Netherlands bought Huijsmans’ painting Interior of a House in North Brabant. This seemed the beginning of success for Huijsmans. In fact, King Willem II owned another painting by Huijsmans which the King must have bought just before or in 1849. It was described as Interior with a woman and a child in the auction catalogue of 1851, which listed all the paintings to be sold after the death of King William II. However, in 1851 Huijsmans decided to give up painting completely and to concentrate on teaching. In 1852 he developed a second teaching method Grondbeginselen der Teekenkunst, eene theoretische en practische Handleiding om het teekenen grondig te leeren.
Between 1853 and 1872 he published articles in several magazines, such as De Gids. As a result of the mediation of Dutch statesman and minister of liberal signature, Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, Huijsmans obtained in 1865 the important position of art teacher at the new and prestigious Willem II College in Tilburg, a school commissioned by King William II himself. The school was housed in the former royal palace, now the City Hall of Tilburg, but moved in 1934 to a new location.