Haverman Margaretha

Description

“Margaretha Haverman”

When was the last time you looked into your letterbox and found personal mail? “A long time ago” you probably say. It is likely you yourself haven’t written any “snail mail” or postcards since the emergence of e-mail and electronic postcard services. Sending all your relatives Holiday Greetings with just one ‘click’ seemed so attractive. You even could make it ‘highly personalized’ with photo’s of you and your friends or your spouse and kids and send them over the internet. Or even better, order them to be printed and sent.
But that is not the same as picking up mail from the mailbox and while you walk back indulging your curiosity about “who wrote that lovely ‘wish’ – maybe even with an old-style fountain pen – on a postcard that delights the eye in such a way?” Experiencing the pleasure to place it in clear vision for the coming weeks, so the front and the back of that card will bring a smile on our face whenever it catches your attention again.
That will absolutely happen with cards featuring female painters. Their paintings can be found in museums like Louvre, Hermitage, National Gallery in London or Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There is a common denominator in most their stories, however, and that is experiencing opposition working in a man’s world.

The story of the Dutch painter Margaretha Haverman (1693-???) is in a way a mysterious one. Margaretha’s father, a captain in the Danish army, settled in Amsterdam, Holland to become the director of a boys’ boarding school. As a man with prestige he was able to talk the internationally well-known still life painter Jan van Huysum into teaching his daughter Margaretha. The man led a very secluded life and was used to let no one enter his studio in fear of plagiarism. After a while he became so jealous of her progress that he made her leave, spreading rumors of (undefined) inappropriate behavior.
In 1721 she marries a French architect and merchant Mondoteguy, who got widowed and leaves for Paris, where she is accepted to the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture after showing a still life in the style of Van Huysum. Beside an assignment of the académie for another painting she was successful in selling her work in the style of Van Huysum. When after a year the new painting is not delivered to the Académie, she was thrown out with the accusation that her acceptance work in reality was of her former teacher Van Huysum.

Some sources say she died at the age of 29. Other sources say she traveled with her husband to Bayonne in the south of France, since there was some mentioning of the wife of the architect in official papers without mentioning her name. According to this source this wife leaves Bayonne after he dies in 1739.
Haverman did not always sign her work. In auction catalogs her name is mentioned frequently. Another assumption is that work from her hand is still assigned to others.

Specifications
• 4/4 full bleed
• 300 GSM
• Paper thickness: 0.13″ (0.34 mm)
• Laminated feel
• White matte back with a small QR code or a bar code