Charles Rochussen, painter

The address begins with a painter. On 7 March 1900 the street was named the Rochussenstraat after Charles Rochussen, a Rotterdam artist and lithographer¹. Born in Kralingen on 1 August 1814, he died in Rotterdam on 22 September 1894, so the honour came about six years after his death and a year before the works at no. 169 were finished².

In November 1900 his full name appeared in print as the name of the street³. A report of 5 November 1900 placed the new Van Duffelen & Pelt furniture factory on the “Charles Rochussenstraat” in the Coolpolder⁴. According to the report, its electric alarm woke the manufacturer who lived upstairs, and police found the would-be burglars in a building under construction in an adjoining street⁵.

Rochussen came from a well-to-do Rotterdam family⁶. His father, Hendrik Rochussen, made soap and salt and collected art, and his brother Henri was also a painter⁷. The street belongs to the city's schildersbuurt, the painters' quarter, among other streets named the same way, such as the Ochterveltstraat⁸.

The surname carries other associations. Rochussen is also a name from Dutch maritime and colonial history: a seventeenth-century privateer from Vlissingen, and a nineteenth-century Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. No documented family link between those men and the painter has been established⁹. The street honours the painter, and on the present evidence no colonial or slave-trading ancestry attaches to the name¹⁰.

The street and the house share a small symmetry. The address opens with a painter's name, and one of the two boys who laid the building's first stone in 1899, the founder's son Gerrit van Duffelen¹¹, would himself become a painter¹². A street of painters, and a house whose first stone was set by one.

The Rochussenstraat today, the street that has carried the painter's name since 1900 (Steven Lek, CC BY-SA 4.0).