FREDERIK HENDRIK KAEMMERER

Landscape and genre painter Frederik Hendrik Kaemmerer was born in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1839. He moved to Paris in 1865, set up a studio there and studied with the well-known landscape painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and at the École des Beaux-Arts. Kaemmerer began his artistic career by painting familiar Dutch subjects; but most of his paintings depict finely detailed scenes from social life under the French Directorate of the First Empire. He executed with great fidelity the period costumes of his subjects, and frequently portrayed flirtatious relationships between men and women. He also painted subjects for the Gobelins tapestry factory in Paris. Kaemmerer won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1874, another at the Universal Exposition in 1889, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in that same year. The artist’s works have been held in the private collections of such American art connoisseurs as J. J. Astor; S. P. Avery; Charles Crocker; Jay Gould; William H. Vanderbilt and William Rockefeller. His paintings are also included among the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mulhouse, France and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. Kaemmerer died in his Paris atelier on April 4, 1902.