Piet Kramer - Shots at sea

He wants to live grandly and compellingly. Artist and painter Piet Kramer works in Paris for a while, suffers from hunger and returns to his birthplace. Once back in Delft, he establishes himself as a painter. He does so successfully, although he still regularly muses about his years in the French capital.
Pieter Cornelis Kramer (1879-1940) is a son of Trijntje van der Gaag and Cornelis Kramer, a carpenter and bricklayer. He works in his father's business, but is actually too impatient for that. After his military service, he ends up with BA Bongers, the teacher of hand drawing at the HBS. He learns the basics of drawing from him. At the Polytechnic School with Karel Sluyterman, he refines his technique.
In 1900 Kramer left for Paris. There he worked for three years as a decorative painter in numerous studios. That apprenticeship made a great impression. Years later he reminisced about his French adventure in the Delftsche Courant: 'Boy, that was your pure life in Bohemia there. Working hard, as long as you felt like it, then begging and going hungry. But living, living! Oh, that was a time.'
Back from Paris, Kramer worked as a stage painter in the theatres of Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Brussels, among others. In 1907, he rented a small house on the Bagijnhof in Delft with artists Cornelis Jan Mension and Louis Bron. From that studio, Kramer travelled all over the city. He made dozens of sketches and studies of striking street corners. Delft was a perfect place for artists in those years, partly because of the Technical University that attracted gifted students and teachers from all over the country. Kramer regularly exhibited with the Delft Art Circle, was a member of the Pulchri Studio in The Hague and eventually could even afford a house on the chic Nieuwe Plantage. The Parisian bohemian had become an established Delft artist.
Piet Kramer, Carillonneur's house on Kerkstraat, seen from the Vrouwenregt, 1926 (TMS 125430)