Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, bowl, decorated with a shrimp

Harm Kamerlingh Onnes was a versatile artist, he made drawings, watercolours, gouaches, oil paintings and ceramics. He is best known for small paintings, watercolours and drawings of everyday life. Almost always with humour. He also frequently used this humour in his ceramics, for which he is also known.

But he made a large number of ceramic objects, in which you regularly find the same humour. Harm Kamerlingh Onnes put his artistry into perspective with the words 'to mess around with'. This should mainly be seen as a way of indicating that Harm Kamerlingh Onnes did not want to provide theoretical foundations for his artistry.

From 1925 onwards, everyday reality is his subject. From that moment on, his work is exclusively figurative. Partly due to a visit to Mondriaan's studio, he realised that abstract art was not for him.

His father Menso was also an artist and in 1911 he gave his son permission to develop as an artist. The artist Floris Verster was an uncle of Harm Kamerlingh Onnes. Another uncle of Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, the eldest brother of his father Menso, was the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. A number of his designs for stained glass windows have discoveries by the physicists Pieter Zeeman and Hendrik Lorentz as their subject. For example, one of these stained glass windows shows a portrait of Hendrik Lorentz and the formulas he devised that describe the behaviour of electrons. Other stained glass windows show the measuring instruments with which the splitting of spectral lines of atoms under the influence of a magnetic field was measured (Zeeman effect). He also made portraits of the physicists Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest.