Aart van der Leeuw

Aart van der Leeuw, 1899; photo by Carel Adama van Scheltema. Aart van der Leeuw (; 23 June 1876 – 17 April 1931) was a Dutch writer of prose fiction and poetry. His reputation rests mostly on two novels, Ik en mijn speelman (1927) and De kleine Rudolf (1930).

Biography Aart van der Leeuw was born in Hof van Delft into a family of notable merchants. He had a strong bond with his mother, whose storytelling was very influential on him; later he read her his stories and poems. His years in elementary school were sad, apparently, and he later wrote about them in Kinderland (1914). ), and read voraciously; the Tachtigers influenced him greatly, and he became a neo-Romantic of sorts. In addition, he got more critical of his family's Protestantism, but while he would become anti-church, he never became irreligious. In this time period he became friends with Carel Adama van Scheltema and with painter Jan Vogelaar, who soon became a mentor to Van der Leeuw.

In February 1931 he fell ill with pneumonia and pleurisy, and never recovered. He died on 17 April, and was buried in Voorburg, with a modest ceremony. A family member read his poem "Mijn vaders tuinen" at the gravesite.

Work The novella Sint-Veit was his literary debut; published in 1908 in Albert Verwey's magazine De Beweging, it had been written years before, in Dordrecht. He published also in De Gids and De Nieuwe Gids, but was less interested in the naturalist writers than he was in those of a more symbolist quality. Van der Leeuw began publishing poetry in 1909 and until 1926 published four collections. He also published three collections of short stories, four prose fiction books, critical prose, and some translations. Very much isolated in Voorburg and loath to mingle in the literary world, his friend Van Schendel helped him prepare a number of his books for publication, including Liederen en Balladen (1910), Kinderland (1913), and Herscheppingen (1916). He traveled abroad only when his friends gifted him a trip to Italy for his 50th birthday, a trip he credited with prompting him to write Ik en mijn speelman, a typically neo-Romanticist book that thematizes the relationship between beauty and reality (influenced, Van der Leeuw said, by 17th-c spiritual writer and mystic Thomas Traherne) and chooses beauty over reality. In his next book, De kleine Rudolf (1930), there is an attempt to reconcile dream and reality, and now reality is accepted, with romanticism being sought in life, not outside of it. In 1928 he was awarded the C.W. van der Hoogtprijs by the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde for Het aardsche paradijs (1927).