Cornelis Hoogendijk

Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866 – 1911) was a Dutch art collector.

Hoogendijk was born in Krimpen aan den IJssel as the third of six children, and studied law at Leiden University before entering the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 1891. One older brother had died before he was born, and his mother died a year after his youngest sister Riet was born in 1874. The death of his remaining older brother when he was only nine left a lasting impression, and when his father died in 1883, Cornelis became the head of the family at age 17. The bequest to the Rijksmuseum was selected by a committee informed by Riet Hoogendijk with the intention to convince politicians to enable the tax exemption status such as the one that had been granted in England for the Wallace collection. Their strategy worked and a law was adopted in 1912 called Vrijstelling van successierecht voor verkrijging van schilderijen uit de nalatenschap van C. Hoogendijk (exemption from inheritance tax for reception of the paintings from the C. Hoogendijk collection). Cornelis, Riet and her husband Gerrit van Blaaderen may have known Lady Wallace personally from their trips to Paris, but from correspondence with the Rijksmuseum it was clear that even before his psychosis it had been the wish of Cornelis to make a donation of important paintings to the Rijksmuseum.

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