Theo Colenbrander

In 1921 a group of admirers in Arnhem set up a pottery called Ram for one purpose, to turn the designs of Theo Colenbrander into finished pieces. He was by then about 80 years old. For its first few years the workshop made earthenware decorated to his designs and nobody else's.

Colenbrander had started out in architecture. As a young man he worked for the Arnhem architect L.H. Eberson, and in 1867 he went to Paris to help build the Dutch pavilion at the World's Fair. His name was made in The Hague, where from 1884 he was the designer and artistic head of the young Rozenburg pottery. He gave its vases and plates irregular shapes and bright, fanciful patterns, most of them inspired by flowers. He left in 1889, and for a while the factory carried on in his manner without him.

For many years after that he worked mainly on carpets, designing them for factories in Amersfoort and Deventer. He died in 1930 in Laag-Keppel, a village in Gelderland not far from Doesburg, the town where he was born.