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Written by Anton, Pieter, Quinten, Marc and Barbara Dreesmann
O ur mother, Marianne L. Dreesmann-van der Spek married our father, Dr Anton C.R. Dreesmann in Amsterdam in 1955. Their lives were devoted to both the close-knit family they formed with their five children and to Vroom & Dreesmann, the privately owned three generation old Dutch department store business. The latter grew into an international retail and services company under Anton Dreesmann’s stewardship and was renamed Vendex International. The other constant in our father’s life was his love for art. Although deep-rooted in his family for two generations, it was enhanced by his own inquisitive mind and thirst for knowledge which led him to assemble a world-class art collection.
During a lifetime of hard work and traveling around the globe, Anton and Marianne Dreesmann combined openness to foreign cultures with profound respect and loyalty to their Dutch roots. This translated into eclectic yet very personal choices in their fine art and decorative art collections, encompassing their appreciation of international tastes along with their deep attachment to art forms from the Low Countries.
Our mother’s personal collection consists by and large, of works from her late husband’s collection that she was most attached to. Most of the pieces included in this catalogue were acquired by Marianne Dreesmann at the auction of her late husband’s collection in 2002.
She was particularly fond of the Berckheyde painting, which depicts the buildings of the Amsterdam ‘Atheneum Illustre’, the predecessor of the University of Amsterdam, where Anton Dreesmann taught as a Professor of Economics for many years.
Marianne Dreesmann was also very proud of the 1621 Adam van Vianen Flora/Summer which will be offered in the Treasures sale, exactly 400 years after its creation.
As her children got married and had children themselves, our mother – ever the materfamilias – enjoyed sharing anecdotes with her grandchildren. One of her favourite stories involved the silver miniature table that she acquired in 1960, in her husband’s absence, at an auction of the collection of her late parents-in-law. She was very nervous about her enthusiastic winning bid of 3,000 Netherlands Guilders. This was a substantial amount at the time. This miniature table has been in her husband’s family for almost a century, as her father-in-law acquired it in Amsterdam in 1922. A comparable miniature table is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.
Our mother also loved the spy glass, one of her favourite conversation pieces. The ‘mock’-glass was the last object Anton Dreesmann acquired in January 2000. It held a special memory for our mother of her late husband’s art collecting acumen.
The collection of Marianne Dreesmann is a prime example of cultivated taste, nourished by an ever constant, cross-cultural exposure to beauty in its many forms. During her and her husband’s long and happy life they were loyal to their aspiration ‘to make life itself a work of art’.
