⁶Gerrit, one of the two names in the stone

On 3 June 1899 the nine-year-old Gerrit van Duffelen laid the building's first stone, with the six-year-old Cornelis Pelt beside him¹. The boy grew up to be a painter. From 1913 to 1923 the address books list him at Rochussenstraat 169b, above the family works, as a kunstschilder, a painter, and a drawing teacher at secondary level². For ten years the flat above the benches was an artist's address.

His work from those years is well recorded. He exhibited steadily, painted still lifes and landscapes of willows and water, and turned more and more to etching the Rotterdam harbour³. In September 1914 the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring gave its painting prize to his Stilleven, a still life entered under the motto Zon, meaning Sun⁴. The shipping lines brought him commercial work. The 1922 advertising poster for the Holland-Oost-Azie Lijn, a large colour lithograph, was long credited to a namesake with shipping connections; two national collections have since returned it to the painter⁵. In the winter of 1922 to 1923 the Holland-Amerika Lijn commissioned him to illustrate its fiftieth-anniversary memorial book⁶. In July 1923, when the director of the Rotterdam Zeevaartschool, the naval college, retired, his students gave him an etching of a ship by Van Duffelen⁷.

This page covers only the decade he worked above the family works. His prizes, solo shows and full body of work belong to the deep dive on the painter, which also lays to rest three claims that turned out to be false, among them an Olympic medal he never won.

His engagement was announced on 10 December 1919, his address given simply as Rotterdam, 169¹. The marriage to Geertruida Kaleveld was announced from Rotterdam on 24 August 1921, and two sons followed, born in August 1922 and November 1923². Two names here were once misread, and both are now corrected. The second son is Kees, not Elis as an earlier search had it, and the family's next street is the Eenhoornstraat, not the Eendrachtsstraat³.

The household settled at Eenhoornstraat 4a, where the birth acts of 1922 and 1923 place the family and the address books print G. J. v. Duffelen, kunstschilder in 1923 and 1924⁴. In January 1926 a third son was born at Schiebroek, which marks the family's move out of the city⁵. From that same year Huib Luns brought Van Duffelen to Amsterdam to teach drawing and anatomy⁶.

We know the Eenhoornstraat address, but not the house. The family's later home, two units on one estate, has no verified picture of its own front. What the material we hold can and cannot tell us is the subject of a deep dive that is mostly a lesson in what does not survive.

His work outlived the addresses. Several Dutch public collections hold it¹. The largest group is in the Rijksprentenkabinet at the Rijksmuseum: about eleven etchings, among them Land van Hoboken in Rotterdam, an etching of the old estate across the road, which the artist gave in 1932². The Rijksakademie, the Dordrechts Museum and the RCE hold more³. The critics placed him with care. He was geen figuur van de omwenteling in de beeldende kunst, no figure of the revolution in the visual arts, but een zeer gevoelig medium, a very sensitive medium, and he was valued above all as a devoted teacher whose pupils outgrew him in fame⁴.

One item belongs on this page and not only in a deep dive. In January 1942, during the occupation, the pro-German cultural weekly De Waag printed an interview with a "G. van Duffelen", signed by Jaap Valk⁵. Next to a conservative view of craft and teaching, the printed answers voice opinions congenial to the occupation's cultural programme⁶. We include it for honesty and go no further. There is no evidence of party membership or of any activity beyond continuing to teach and exhibit, as most Dutch artists did in those years. How far the source goes, and how the name is tied to the painter, is explained in the method note on De Waag.

He died at Bloemendaal in early April 1967, aged seventy-seven, and was cremated at Westerveld⁷. His family still keep several of his paintings and etchings and his artist's palette⁸. These were photographed in 2026, are in copyright until 2038, and appear with their required credit in the deep dive on the family-held works⁹. The fuller album the family shared, with family photographs and works together, is A Painter's Album, Kept in the Family.

Then one object came back. In August 2026 the present owner of Rochussenstraat 169 bought a watercolour by Van Duffelen, De Rijn vanaf de Grebbeberg, the Rhine seen from the Grebbeberg¹⁰. Its maker had laid the building's first stone at the age of nine¹¹.

The address books list him at 169b through 1923¹². Within a few years the rooms below had passed to a carpet and furnishing company, and there the corner's second life, the one the next era opens on, began.