Two houses, one estate, no facade
When and his family left the neighbourhood of the corner, they moved to the Eenhoornstraat. Two of his children's birth acts, of 1922 and 1923, give the address as Eenhoornstraat 4a, and the address book lists "G. J. v. Duffelen, kunstschilder" at no. 4a in 1923 and 1924 . By January 1926 the family had moved on to Schiebroek . That is what the held records settle about their years in the street. The house itself they cannot show.
The house that is only a floor plan
The family's home was unit 4a of no. 4. In the held material that building is represented by an 1885 building-permit drawing for fitting out an office over a warehouse, at a scale of 1:100. The street's permit files for 1905–1940, which would have covered the family's own tenancy, burned.
The drawing is a plan. It looks down on the rooms of no. 4: the office, the warehouse, the hallway and the stair. There is no elevation, so the front of the house does not appear at all.
A face, but the wrong one
Next door, no. 6 does survive with a front. After fire damage it was restored in 1901 and fitted out as a metal and bicycle factory, and its blueprint carries a proper street elevation: a round oculus above two arched upper windows.
It is a real facade, and it is the wrong house. This is the factory at no. 6. It is not no. 4, and nothing in it can be read back onto the family's home.
Two parcels, one estate
The two numbers are easy to confuse. The held building and cadastral records identify nos. 4 and 6 as two separate buildings on separate cadastral parcels, no. 4 on parcel 1883 and no. 6 on parcel 1041. Both were grouped under one old estate name, De Eenhoorn.
The 1938 house-number map shows the split plainly: two parcels, two numbers and a boundary between them. It fixes where the houses stood and which parcel was which. Like the permits, it says nothing about the face of no. 4a.
What the street looked like, roughly
A photograph from 1916 shows the street in the years around the family's tenancy.
This is the street, not their house. No legible text identifies any building, and nothing in the picture can be tied to no. 4a. It is here only to give the look of the place, a working street by a harbour.
The end of the street
The Eenhoornstraat did not survive the war. On 14 May 1940 the German bombardment that burned the centre of Rotterdam destroyed the block. A catalogued photograph records the ruins at the street's corner with the Leuvehaven.
Even this does not show their house, only the corner in rubble. No verified likeness of the front of the painter's home on the Eenhoornstraat has been found in the collections searched, so no wall should be pointed at as theirs.