Louis Raemaekers, HRMS (1869-1956)
The Dutch artist, Louis Raemaekers, gained an international reputation for his innovative political cartoons, which provided bold and unsparing criticism of German atrocities during the First World War.
The son of a newspaper editor, Louis Raemaekers was born on 6 April 1869 in Roermond, in the Dutch province of Limburg, on the German frontier. Having attended the local lower and middle schools, from 1879 to 1889, he studied art at the Rijksnormaalschool, Amsterdam, under Jacobus Roeland de Kruijff and Theo Molkenboer, in the years 1891-93. He then went on to Brussels to study at the Académie Royale des Beaux- Arts and in the studio of Ernest Blanc-Garin. He began his career as a painter of landscapes and portraits, and also a teacher, rising to become the director of the evening drawing school for craftsmen at Wageningen in Gelderland. In 1902, he married Johanna Petronella van Mansvelt, and settled in her birthplace of Haarlem; together they would have one son and two daughters.
In 1907, Raemaekers started to produce political cartoons and posters, and two years later joined the staff of the Amsterdam Telegraaf.
Following the outbreak of the First World War, he gained international recognition with powerful chalk drawings charting the European political situation. Originally appearing in the Telegraaf, they were widely reproduced, being published in Britain in Land and Water and the Daily Mail, and then collected in volumes. His bold and unsparing criticism of German atrocities was something new and his style has been compared to that of Steinlen. His achievements during the war were widely exhibited and gained him many international honours.
From 1916, Raemaekers lived at ‘Woodthorpe’, a house in Sydenham Hill Road, in southeast London, and involved himself in English artistic circles, exhibiting at the Fine Art Society (almost annually between 1915-20) and being elected an honorary member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters (1916). In 1917, he accepted the request of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, to travel to the United States to win over American opinion to the interests of the Allies.
Following the end of the war, Raemaekers lived in Brussels and worked for French language newspapers. He campaigned in favour of the League of Nations and attempted to raise awareness of the dangers of Nazism to world peace. Spending most of the Second World War in the United States, he died at Scheveningen, the coastal resort close to The Hague, in The Netherlands, on 26 July 1956.
