During his life, the French painter Alphonse Stengelin (1882-1938) made more than eighty paintings by Hooghalen. They now hang in museums throughout Europe. Four of them have recently been back at the place where everything started.
At first glance it seems illogical: a painter from Lyon who comes to Hooghalen year after year to make paintings there. Yet for 35 years, Stengelin always went to Drenthe, where he recorded the surroundings with brush and brush.
The painter stayed as standard in Kuiper Logement, now Restaurant Het Wapen van Scotland. Restaurant owner Kees Mulder became possessed by the story of the striking Frenchman, who slept so often more than a hundred years earlier where he now serves Scottish Whiskey and Haggis.
“During the Coronapandemie we had to close like everyone else and then I suddenly had a lot of time left. A bit too much,” says Mulder with a smile. The catering boss came across a painting by Stengelin, which also shows the then accommodation. He decided to delve into the painter.
Mulder regularly came to the stalkin between 1879 and 1914 in the Boerendorp in Drenthe. He was hit by the changing skies above the open landscape of Hooghalen.
“In Lyon, the air is always blue in the summer and Stemin thought that was boring to paint. Here the air is different every day,” says the restaurant owner.
The tradition wants the Frenchman to see a painting at an exhibition in Paris by the Assen painter Lodewijk Mulder. He was so impressed that he contacted his fellow artist in Drenthe. They pointed stem in the direction of Hooghalen.
He became a familiar face in the village of Drenthe and became friends with the residents, who in the long run called him affectionately ‘master stem’. With his long beard and red velvet costume, he was a striking appearance.
Many of the paintings that Stengin made in Hooghalen hung for a long time in the accommodation where he stayed. But over the years the paintings disappeared from the village. A part now hangs in museums in the Netherlands, France and Switzerland, others are in the possession of private individuals.
Restaurant owner Kees Mulder – not a family of Lodewijk – tracked down four Haoler paintings on the internet, in France and Switzerland. He bought them and had them taken to Drenthe, where they now adorn the wall of the former accommodation. Mulder now also has a whole pile of sketches from the Frenchman.
The search of the catering boss is not nearly over yet. He already has paintings from an old mill, a meadow with cows, a farm and a nature reserve. Now another one where the forerunner of his restaurant is also on.
“I suspect that there are still people who have paintings from Stengelin in the house, also here in Hooghalen. He could do well Dutch and came into contact with the villagers a lot. So there should be even more paintings, perhaps without people knowing it,” says Mulder.
Due to the start of the First World War, the French painter no longer came to Drenthe. He left for Switzerland, where he died in 1938. In Hooghalen, only a street sign reminds him without explanation.
Mulder wants to change that. “I am planning to hang a plaque on the wall of my restaurant, with information about Stengelin. And I hope that the municipality of Midden-Drenthe wants to put who he was on the street sign.”