Reijer Johan Antonie Stolk (1896 – 1945). What we know about his life is vague and nebulous. The work he left is brutally bold and elegant.

Self portrait. Undated.
Reijer Johan Antonie Stolk (1896 – 1945).

Reijer Johan Antonie Stolk was as elusive and opaque a character as his work is bold.

Born on Java in Indonesia. it’s known that Stolk, the future graphic artist, painter, sculptor and inventor migrated to the Netherlands between the ages of 3 and 12. By 1910 he’d enrolled at the Applied Arts School in Haarlem, Amsterdam. At this particular school, he was in illustrious company. One of his schoolmates was the genius Maurits Cornelis Escher, and for his teachers, he had the equally brilliant but ill-fated, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita and Chris Lebeau, a multi- talented artist and anarcho-communist. Being surrounded with and inspired by such talent, he excelled. His teachers later described Stolk as the most talented student in the school. From 1922-1926, Stolk lived in Vienna and whilst there he created designs for aircraft and wrote patents for some of them. From 1927-1939 he taught at the Institute of Applied Arts in Amsterdam.

In 1930 he embarked on an African trip. He visited the Gold Coast and Nigeria, two months to the Gold Coast and Nigeria on behalf of the Deventer textile factory Ankersmit, studying the patterns on clothing fabrics. This two month journey had a major influence on him and his work.

From 1939 to 1945 he in Amsterdam. Stolk was not commercially minded, didn’t exhibit often and rarely printed large print runs. It was often enough for him to send a print or two to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and the RKD in The Hague.

Stolk is brilliant because he doesn’t fit. If he’s discussed today, it’s because he’s unusual. Perhaps he deliberately set out to confuse, making himself and his work hard to pin dow. Today his name is sometimes listed as Reijer Johan Antonie Stolk or Reyer Stolk. He also signed work with the name Reyer Stolk Soegima. Soegima was his mother ‘s maiden name. Sometimes he signed work in mirror writing. He was ambivalent about money, about exhibiting. He seems to have wanted to fade, to recess into history’s mist.

Inadvertent genius. The Historic American Buildings Survey randomly document Deer Lodge, Madison, Powell, Ravalli, Cascade and Park Counties in Montana.

Art & Design Travel

The work he left us however, is loud and clear. Brutally strong, intriging and elegant, all at once.

The world just wasn’t ready for the “incorruptable spirit” of Danish artist, Johannes Holbek and his “Decadent Barbarism” (1904).

“Momoyogusa”. A World of Things : Flowers of a Hundred Generations by Kamisaka Sekka. In 1901, the son of a Samurai family was Japan’s “chosen one” to reframe Japanese art for the Western eye.

William Sharp’s sumptuous 1854 illustrations of The Great Water Lily of America, the “vegetable wonder” that owes it’s life to scarab beetles, has 10 foot wide leaves and flowers that smell of fruit.

Planet of the Apes in the late 1800s, a King of Foxes and a gathering of witches. Dali meets Poe and paints relentlessly in his studio on New York’s 10th St.

In 1878, an obscure Japanese artist named Watanabe Seitei went to a Paris dinner party and drew two birds in old-school kachōga style for the legendary painter Degas. 20 years later, Seitei was designing amazing avant garde woodcuts.

The world just wasn’t ready for the “incorruptable spirit” of Danish artist, Johannes Holbek and his “Decadent Barbarism” (1904).

Robert Riggs’s incredible “Legends of the Lenape Indians” of 1933.

Visit Norway’s remote Vestland coastline with Anders Folkestadås, turn of the century lighthouse builder & amateur photographer.

In 1878, an obscure Japanese artist named Watanabe Seitei went to a Paris dinner party and drew two birds in old-school kachōga style for the legendary painter Degas. 20 years later, Seitei was designing amazing avant garde woodcuts.

In the 1920s Paramount Pictures did imagine their black and white films in colour : colour publicity for black & white silent Westerns : The Covered Wagon.

The Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956). A Princess helped him give up the life of a farmer to put his faith and future in the hands of the flower fairies. He lived magically ever after.

The natural world, ancient Egypt, Meso-America and Japan. The Art Deco designer, Emile-Allain Séguy really mixed it all up in his series, “Prismes: 40 Planches de Dessins et Coloris Nouveaux” (1931).

Emile-Allain Séguy saw in butterflies “un monde somptueux de formes et de couleurs” (a world of sumptuous forms and colors) and he brought that world to vivid life in Papillons (1925).

William Sharp’s sumptuous 1854 illustrations of The Great Water Lily of America, the “vegetable wonder” that owes it’s life to scarab beetles, has 10 foot wide leaves and flowers that smell of fruit.

The incredible, psychedelic tropical fish fantasy of Louis Renard & Samuel Fallours : 1719’s Natural history of the rarest curiosities of the Indian Sea.

Dope fiends busted. 1950s narcotics crime photography from the archives of L.A. Enquirer.

John Martin’s sister was murdered by a neighbour, one brother was a “perfectly cracked” eccentric philosopher/inventor & the other an insane religious firestarter. Perhaps it’s no surprise John became the ultimate harbinger of The Apocolypse.

Outraged. The 1896 murder of Helen Thomson. Markinch, Fife, Scotland.

Achille Lemot learns the exact price of a mistress in 1870s Paris.

Erland Soderburg. A 1907 matricide. “Then I grabbed a small kitchen knife that was lying on the table. I hacked at her throat, then slashed it and the blood spurted out on me.”

Children of the Runestones. 300 A.D. Sweden.

The Dutch ocean liner Hooft, plagued by rats, burned three times and cursed by a French shipyard that lost 3 ocean liners to fire between 1930-1933.

1800s India. A mystery blue-eyed, pale skinned redhead is painted alongside those of 28 Mughal royals. An anonymous court artist evokes how richly the Indian “1%” lived, in these exquisite and rarely seen paintings.

Found. 3 Untitled works (1974). By an unknown artist working in a daylight atelier in Budapest.

8 mystery photographs from 1908/1910. From within some kind of medical institution or sanitorium somewhere in Eastern Europe. There’s one small clue: The Trendelenburg Position. Maybe.

Adventures in war torn 1950s Hungary with UVATERV’s anonymous state photography dept.

The totally unique Russian neoclassicist travel painter, Alexander Evgenievich Yakovlev. In the early 1900s, he travelled to Italy, Spain, Mongolia, China, Japan, France, Vietnam, Syria, Iran Afghanistan and Africa. His untimely death in Paris surely robbed us of so much more.

Browse some Chinese home decor inspiration swatches, personally selected, drawn & lithographed in 1867 by the original style guru, Owen Jones for his “Examples of Chinese ornament”.

Join a quirky Norwegian engineer named Kristian Berge on his skiing trips, meet his friends, see his naked selfie and enjoy his spendid photographs of work jaunts along the Western coast. 1912-1924.

Portuguese architect Fernando Varanda’s reference photographs of 1970s Yemen. Part Two.

The world just wasn’t ready for the “incorruptable spirit” of Danish artist, Johannes Holbek and his “Decadent Barbarism” (1904).

“Momoyogusa”. A World of Things : Flowers of a Hundred Generations by Kamisaka Sekka. In 1901, the son of a Samurai family was Japan’s “chosen one” to reframe Japanese art for the Western eye.

William Sharp’s sumptuous 1854 illustrations of The Great Water Lily of America, the “vegetable wonder” that owes it’s life to scarab beetles, has 10 foot wide leaves and flowers that smell of fruit.

Planet of the Apes in the late 1800s, a King of Foxes and a gathering of witches. Dali meets Poe and paints relentlessly in his studio on New York’s 10th St.

In 1878, an obscure Japanese artist named Watanabe Seitei went to a Paris dinner party and drew two birds in old-school kachōga style for the legendary painter Degas. 20 years later, Seitei was designing amazing avant garde woodcuts.

Reijer Johan Antonie Stolk (1896 – 1945). What we know about his life is vague and nebulous. The work he left is brutally bold and elegant.

Inadvertent genius. The Historic American Buildings Survey randomly document Deer Lodge, Madison, Powell, Ravalli, Cascade and Park Counties in Montana.

The world just wasn’t ready for the “incorruptable spirit” of Danish artist, Johannes Holbek and his “Decadent Barbarism” (1904).

“Momoyogusa”. A World of Things : Flowers of a Hundred Generations by Kamisaka Sekka. In 1901, the son of a Samurai family was Japan’s “chosen one” to reframe Japanese art for the Western eye.

William Sharp’s sumptuous 1854 illustrations of The Great Water Lily of America, the “vegetable wonder” that owes it’s life to scarab beetles, has 10 foot wide leaves and flowers that smell of fruit.