Sjoerd Bakker - Ets - 1973

Etching by Sjoerd Bakker. Year: 1973. Number: 79/150. Dimensions sheet: H49.5 x w64.5cm. Dimensions image: H23 x w51cm. The work is signed in pencil, lower right, by the artist. The authenticity of the work offered is fully guaranteed. A certificate of authenticity can be emailed upon request.

Upon purchase, the work can be picked up in 's-Gravenzande (near The Hague (Scheveningen), Rotterdam and Delft and 5 minutes from the beach). The period for collection, with advance payment, is very generous, in other words, the buyer can collect the work weeks or even months later and, if possible, combine it with a visit to one of the above-mentioned cities or the beach. The work can also be sent via Postnl. Our shipping days are Tuesday and Thursday.

Sjoerd Bakker (Leeuwarden, 10 June 1915 – Overveen, 1 July 1943) was a Dutch resistance fighter during the Second World War. The Amsterdam couturier Sjoerd Bakker – he is always referred to as a tailor, but the lawyer Lau Mazirel later calls him a promising star, who had actually already proven himself as a couturier – was active in the Amsterdam resistance together with painter and writer Willem Arondeus. Like Arondeus, he was homosexual. Sjoerd, whose family owned the fashion magazines PS Bakker in Leeuwarden and Groningen, was trained at Hirsch & Cie and then established himself with a number of milliners at Vondelstraat 24, around the corner from Leidseplein and Leidsestraat. After the war, Max Heymans told how he designed hats for Sjoerd when he was in hiding.

Sjoerd joined the resistance group around the sculptor Gerrit van der Veen, together with Aa van der Meer, a close friend who had worked at Metz before the war and who went to work as a courier during the war. He was one of the participants in the Attack on the Amsterdam Population Register (1943) on the Plantage Middenlaan in Amsterdam. Because he was a fashion designer, he sewed all the police uniforms in his studio that would be used by the attackers so that they could enter disguised as policemen. Under the leadership of Van der Veen and together with Willem Arondeus, Johan Brouwer, Karl Gröger, Coos Hartogh, Henri Halberstadt, Rudi Bloemgarten, Sam van Musschenbroek, Koen Limperg, Guus Reitsma, Cornelis Leendert Barentsen and Cornelis Roos entered the building disguised as policemen on 27 March 1943 and blew up the building with explosives. After the attack Sjoerd went into hiding but he was arrested and after a trial at the Colonial Institute (now the Tropical Institute) he was shot by the Germans in the dunes of Overveen. In 1986 he was named Righteous Among the Nations.
Just before his execution, Sjoerd was allowed to make a request. He asked for his beautiful pink shirt. In it, he was murdered together with the 11 others in the dunes near Overveen. When the grave was discovered after the war, the pink shirt helped to identify the group.
His paternal uncle, Paul (Stephanus Johannes Paulus, 1900) and his eldest brother Popke Sjoerd (1912) also did resistance work and also did not survive the war. Paul, who from 1941, besides Vrij Nederland and Trouw, produced millions of pieces of illegal printed matter, was executed on 9 February 1945, Popke was one of the victims of the shooting on the Dam on 7 May 1945. The poet, journalist and member of parliament Fedde Schurer wrote about this in his Herinneringen 'Popke stood next to us on the Dam, one of the family of whom the SD said that they seemed to be waging a Privatkrieg with Germany'. Sjoerd's brother Albert and his cousin Bert Bakker, the publisher, both worked for Vrij Nederland. Together with Aa van der Meer, who was engaged to Sjoerd just before his death, they used the studio on the Vondelstraat as a hiding place. Here Aa met Henk van Randwijk of the illegal Vrij Nederland with whom she had a long-term relationship. During the famine winter, Albert chartered the inland vessel De Adelaar III to collect one hundred and sixty tons of potatoes in Friesland, which Vrij Nederland had bought, and to sail back to Amsterdam, bribing the harbour masters with bottles of gin. After the war, Albert became deputy director of Vrij Nederland. Popke's son Sjoerd (1943-2022) is named after his executed uncle.