Willem Coenraad Brouwer


Willem Coenraad Brouwer was a Dutch ceramist and sculptor.

Life and work

Brouwer was a son of Nicholas Brouwer, head of a primary school in Leiden, and Antonia Coert. He studied at the Tekenschool in his hometown. From 1894 to 1898 he worked in the studio designing book ornamentation and letter cutting for his brother-in-law J.A. Loebèr. He then went to Gouda, where he became potter at the Goedewaagen ceramic factory. Around 1900 He joined the artists group 't Binnenhuis. In 1901, Brouwer founded his own ceramic business in Leiderdorp under the name of Brouwer's Pottery Factory.
In 1906 he also made construction pottery and garden ceramics, for example he made the ceramics for the construction of the Peace Palace in The Hague. He is considered an innovator in this field. He collaborated with architects like Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Jacobus Oud, Willem Marinus Dudok and Jan Wils. He was a member of the Dutch Society of Sculptors.
In 1927 he published his autobiography which he started with the words:
If the following sentences will attempt to construct an image of the things experienced by me, it is almost without saying that this image will be incomplete. Indeed... the "experience" will undergo without pretense, later to serve as "source" for a historical accounting. Would we had known then, that "our time" would have had a very significant impact to... what we now call modern art, we had perhaps made more notes to help write pure history. However we will have to do with a story gleaned from memory."

Works, a selection