Leo Gestel

Leo Gestel came to modern art almost by inheritance. Born in 1881 near Utrecht, he was taught first by his father, an art-school director, and an uncle who had painted beside Vincent van Gogh. By his twenties he was in the thick of the European avant-garde, and together with Piet Mondrian and Jan Sluijters he ranks among the first Dutch painters to absorb it.

Gestel never settled into one style. Across a decade he moved through pointillist luminism, fauve colour, cubism and futurism, and in 1913 the Berlin dealer Herwarth Walden invited him to the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, the landmark survey of European modernism. His summers he spent in the village of Bergen, in the artists' colony known as the Bergen School.

In February 1929 a fire destroyed his studio in Bergen and some 400 works, many of them ready for an exhibition. He moved to Blaricum and kept working through the 1930s, drawing the fishing families of Spakenburg and painting horses again, and his last commission, a large mural for the post office in Hilversum, was finished by the painter Charles Roelofsz after Gestel's death in 1941.