Adriaan van der Hoop

Adriaan van der Hoop (April 28 1778, Amsterdam – March 17 1854, Amsterdam) was a Dutch banker and art collector, who contributed substantially to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. On his death he left 250 paintings to the city of Amsterdam. The city could barely pay the inheritance tax. [Knoef, J. (1949) De verzamelaar A. van der Hoop. In: Jaarboek Amstelodamum 42, p. 51 - 71.] Van der Hoop was one of the richtest men in the Netherlands, an influential politician: a member of the city council, Provincial States and the First Chamber.

Life

Adriaan van der Hoop was the son of Joan Cornelis van der Hoop, secretary of the Sociëteit van Suriname, prosecutor for the Admiralty of Amsterdam and Minister of the Navy. Adriaan studied law in Groningen and Kiel, when it was still a Danish city. (N.B. Holland was occupied by the French army between 1795 – 1813). With his Danish passport he traveled through Germany and England. In 1811, he was hired by the firm Hope & Co., for years an important lender to the Russian state.

Back in Holland in 1814 Adriaan van der Hoop was involved in the setting up of the Constitution and accompanied emperor Alexander I of Russia on his visit to Holland. In 1815, he was appointed by Alexander Baring to lead the firm Hope & Co in Amsterdam.

A debt of 100,000 guilder owed by his brother-in-law Jan Clifford led in 1819 to a drawn-out court case between the two men. The day after the verdict, four years later, Clifford committed suicide with a pistol.

Adriaan raised rare plants on his country estate "Spaarnberg", near Santpoort. There he grew 120 kinds of South African Erica; he had two blossoming agaves and ten kinds of orchids. [Gnirrep, K. (2004) De Schat van Spaarnberg. In: Maandblad Amstelodamum, p. 3-21.] The countryhouse was designed by Jan David Zocher, who on van der Hoop's request also designed a new stock exchange in Amsterdam.

Adriaan owned racehorses and in 1832 he started to collect art objects on a large scale. His collection paintings - including items by Vermeer, Ruisdael, Rembrandt, Steen and Adriaen van der Werff - could be visited by appointment at his house on Keizersgracht 444, that he had bought in 1822. (The building had previously been inhabited by Thomas Hope, his father Jan Hope and his cousin Henry Hope.) Adriaan bought works by contemporary painters, including Jan Adam Kruseman, Johannes Christianus Schotel and Barend Cornelis Koekkoek.

ources

External links

* [http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/pers/tentoonstellingen/hetgeschenk?lang=en The Gift]
* [http://www.codart.nl/publications/show/section/36/ Craft and commerce]