Harm Kamerlingh Onnes

The field of work recorded is ceramic art and stained glass design. Places of work recorded in the authority are Zoeterwoude-Dorp, Medan and Scheveningen. Works named in the authority record are Frederik Schmidt-Degener (1881-1941). Director of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (1922-41). Work by Harm Kamerlingh Onnes is recorded in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Stadsarchief Rotterdam, Museum Arnhem, Centraal Museum and Dordrechts Museum.

Kamerlingh Onnes was born in Zoeterwoude in 1893. His father Menso Kamerlingh Onnes was a painter and member of the Hague School, who in 1911 gave his son permission to develop as an artist. He also gave him his first drawing and painting lessons. One of his uncles was the painter Floris Verster, and another uncle the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. In his early years from 1915 to 1925 his work was influenced by modernism. In 1918 he designed a number of abstract stained-glass windows for the Spark House, which was designed by Jacobus Oud. From 1925, he started to take the everyday reality as his subject, and from that time he only made figurative works. It was after a visit to the studio of Mondrian, that he had realized that abstract art was not for him. Some of his designs for stained-glass windows have discoveries of physicists Pieter Zeeman and Hendrik Lorentz as a subject. One of these stained-glass windows contained a portrait of Hendrik Lorentz and formulas devised by him that describe the behavior of electrons. Other stained-glass windows show the instruments to measure the splitting of spectral lines of atoms under the influence of a magnetic field is measured, the so-called Zeeman effect. He also made portraits of the physicists Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest. Kamerlingh Onnes' work was included in the 1939 exhibition and sale Onze Kunst van Heden (Our Art of Today) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. • Illustration — Glass stained windows, Noordwijkerhout • Illustration — 6 cents stamp for the child, 1929 • Illustration — Tile with geometric motif, 1953 In 1953 Kamerlingh Onnes with Bert Nienhuis Piet Wiegman, Dirk Hubers and Frans Wildenhain, took part of the exhibition "five contemporary potters" in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which was one of the first museum presentations of modern artisan ceramics in the Netherlands.