People around Philippe Smit

Jacobus Smit was born in 1850 in Zwolle, a town in the north of the Netherlands. He married Clotilde Courdy on 1 May 1873. The couple had eight children, the seventh being Philippe. They lived in Zwolle, where Jacobus worked as a hairdresser before moving with his family to Paris in 1895. Clotilde died in 1910.1...

Fourth daughter of Jacobus Smit and his wife Marie-Clotilde Courdy, Emma was born in 1885 in Zwolle, the Netherlands, a year before her brother Philippe....

Born in Amsterdam on 26 September 1877, this Dutch art-loving mortgage broker and amateur painter was married to Berendina Hubscher. He met Philippe Smit around 1910, at a time when the painter was leading the life of a struggling young artist in Paris....

Berendina Johanna Hubscher (nicknamed Moeke, Dien, Dientje and Oomoezie) was born on 28 October 1878 in Oldenzaal, Netherlands....

Marijke Pitcairn was born on 7 September 1905 in Bussum, Netherlands, from the marriage of Nicolaas and Berendina Urban....

Margaretha Charlotte Urban (nicknamed Lotty) was born on 31 March 1915 in Amsterdam from the marriage of Nicolaas and Berendina Urban, ten years after her sister Marijke....

Son of PPG Industries founder John Pitcairn, was a clergyman, theologian, philanthropist, and connoisseur of the arts and antiquities....

Coming from a family originally from Bois-le-Roi (Seine-et-Marne), René Massé meets Philippe Smit - a poor young man at the time - in Paris around 1905, at a drawing class. According to an anecdote he confided to Anton Zelling many years later,1 their teacher is said to have taken Massé aside and urged him never to abandon his fellow student, but to look after him “like a mother”, predicting: “For I assure you: that boy is a genius, and his life will not be easy!” Zelling reports that Massé kept this promise and remained faithful to Smit, with whom he shared a friendship lasting nearly forty years. Reflecting on this fraternal bond, Zelling would later marvel in his writings: “What a miracle that the three of us, Philippe, René and I, should have been lifelong companions, until death parted us.”2...

Born in Amsterdam on 28 June 1880, Anton Zelling worked as a journalist from 1907 to 1925 for Hofstad and Utrechts Dagblad. Married to Léonie Lowositz, he had five children from this union....

The paths of Philippe Smit (1886–1948) and the Dutch painter Jan Zondag would probably have crossed in Hilversum in the early 1910s. A chance encounter in an antiques shop, where both men were searching for Japanese prints, marked the beginning of a close and enduring friendship....

An atheist, Ernst Pfeiffer took an interest in Swedenborgian beliefs in 1916 after having worked with the Salvation Army.1 In 1918, he went to the USA to study it more in-depth and when he could have met with Theodore Pitcairn.2...

Leonardus Albertus Hubscher, Berendina’s younger brother by four years, was born in 1882 in Almelo, Holland. His second marriage was to Emily Ramp, mother of Virginia Wenderhold....