Bertha van Hasselt

In 1928, when Amsterdam hosted the Summer Olympics, the Games still handed out medals for art alongside the ones for sport, and Dutch artists were invited to compete. Among them was Bertha van Hasselt, a painter then in her late forties, showing her work in the art contest held beside the Games.

She had been born in Zwolle in 1878 and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she later taught. Her subjects were steady and domestic: portraits, town views, the cool interiors of churches, and above all flower still lifes, which critics of her day singled out for their delicacy. She died in Nijmegen in 1932, four years after those Olympic Games in her own country.