Table of Contents
The most important people in Paris
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Old Pictures of Paris
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Bartle van der Heyde
Semarang, 28 Februari 1926
Lydia and Bartle
Quote from Nikolai van der Heyde – how his parents met
One day, in the early 1930s, my father and a friend (a Frisian artist [Johannes Elsinga]) decided to go to Paris. The friend needed my father as he didn’t speak any French. And my father needed a distraction. Travelling in those days wasn’t as common as it is now, and so they both left full of excitement. I think my father was playing it a little, as he had just returned from a long sojourn in the Dutch East Indies. In Paris, they went straight to Montparnasse, where everything worthwhile was happening: Hemingway and John Dos Passos were having their famous parties at Le Select – Gertrude Stein was entertaining people at her fabulous bookstore, while at La Coupole (that most fantastic of all Parisian restaurants) Modigliani and his inseparable companion Soutine were holding court. But at La Rotonde, my father and his friend became acquainted with Kees van Dongen and another Frisian artist, Tjerk Bottema. My father and Bottema became close friends (we still possess quite a few wonderful sketches he made; even a small red-framed painting of me as an infant) and one of the very first things Bottema did – as an act of true friendship – was to bring my father to his all-time favourite restaurant in Montparnasse: Djiguite – (named after a group of Russian Cossacks, very famous at the time). This was the small restaurant my grandfather had started (after other businesses in Nice and Berlin, Germany, had proven to be unsuccessful). And here, one day, my father laid eyes on my mother and his heart started singing. And the rest is history.Nikolai van der Heyde – letter to Natasha Lord-Kamendrovsky
A Cossack Circus
A Cossack circus group performing the traditional Kuban dzhigitovka horse gymnastics