Pjer
After a 45-minute chat with Pjer Strolenberg, one feels you’ve just scratched the surface. He’s a compelling storyteller, and a man who’s worn many hats (and also many wrist watches!) over the course of his 58 years. For the past 10 years, Pjer has owned het Koffiehuisje, a popular café across the street from the Gravensteen in Leiden. He previously worked as an expert in art provenance with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Dutch government and Christie’s auction house, and he’s still active in organizing exhibitions of art and historical artefacts around the Netherlands (a topic we barely had time to discuss). In his free time, Pjer enjoys repairing broken wrist watches, a passion he’s enjoyed since childhood. Pjer lives with his wife, Marian Hoeber, in Leiden.
“The official name [of the café] is Sintpietershuis … On the old charts from the 17th century this spot is marked as the ‘t Suppiershuysinghe, which means house of the jailer … [prisoners in the Gravensteen jail] did not get food from the community, so the family had to come over here to make sure that they got food. Otherwise they would be starving or they had to get food from the church or something … the [government] did not provide food for the prisoners … the jailer took care of [preparing and bringing] food for the prisoners.”
“It was an idea of the guy who first started the Koffiehuisje to name it [‘t Suppiershuysinghe] … but nobody calls it that … everybody in Leiden knows it best as het koffiehuisje.”
The cozy Koffiehuisje is located at the corner of the Gerecht and the Papengracht, both of which used to be canals. Pjer points to historic drawings on the café walls of the Gravensteen building and the execution ground in front, which was surrounded by canal water in past centuries. The execution ground lies just outside het koffiehuisje. “The judges would be under the arches [during an execution]. I think that’s a very good thing. If you sentence someone to die, the judge has to be present. So these judges … had to be present at the time of the execution. They would sit away from the public because there was this water here [points to a picture on the wall]. It was right in front so nobody could get” to the execution ground … If I remember correctly, the last execution was in 1867. It was a hanging … I think it was the last public execution in Holland, except of course for the Second World War.”
Pjer relishes the details. When a prisoner was executed by hanging, “they would not hang here for a long time. Only one or two days. And then they would be transported to the gallows field.” A prisoner would then continue hanging until his flesh decomposed, and then the prisoner’s family “would collect the bones … and they were allowed to bury the bones [in a church cemetery]. You cannot bury the guilty or the sinful body … but it’s the flesh that is sinful, not the bones … I thought this was interesting. It’s like this thing that makes no sense to me.”
There is no truth to rumors of a secret passage between the jailer’s house and the Gravensteen jail: “The thing is there could very well be. Because in this water pit [still located in the middle of the café] there’s a connection with water, and there used to be a canal right in front of that window [points to the Gerecht] and also that window [points to the Papengracht]. So we are close to the water. So there could very well be a connection to [the Gravensteen jail via] the water. But it’s not really like that.”
The water pit “is quite deep. And now the water is very high … And if you would fall in you would not come out. Because the walls are [shaped] like a bottle. So if you fall in there’s no way you can hold onto anything … you couldn’t tread water for very long.”
“As a matter of fact, my very own niece fell” into the water pit earlier this year. The lid that covers the pit was temporarily removed at that time “because I wanted to make a little AC outlet. I wanted to put a lamp in it, and a glass [cover] so people can look in.” His niece, Digna, was 19 years old and working at the café at that time, “and she comes walking in and she says ‘hi’ to [an electrician who was working on the AC outlet] and she did not see [the uncovered water pit] and she just fell right in … we had her out in about two or three minutes. But it was very lucky that she wasn’t harmed ... She had nightmares for several weeks. And of course I did. If something was to happen to her that would be the end for the Koffiehuisje. I would not want to continue, I would pass the torch to someone else.”
The Koffiehuisje started business in 1975. “And a couple of years later the sandwich bar came into being. And then it was sold in 1988 to a very good friend of mine, who became very sick about 10 years ago. And from that moment on I was taking care of the coffeehouse apart from my other jobs … He had a brain aneurysm … so he was [partially] paralyzed. Because I was a good friend of his … I said I’ll take care of [the coffeehouse]. And then when he died his heirs wanted to give me the coffeehouse … but there was this clause in the original draft that the first owner had the right to buy back. And so this is what happened: they gave me the coffeehouse as it is, the name and all the stuff that’s in there. But they could not give me the walls. So the walls went back to the original owner, who is also a friend of ours. So it’s all been done in a very [friendly way].”
An accidental coffee house operator: “It was not my intention. It was really just something that comes your way. In my life, this is what happens most of the time.”
Pjer moved to Los Angeles in 1988 and worked for two years at the Getty Museum: “I lived in Santa Monica at first, and then I went on living in Pacific Palisades … The first year I was an intern at the Getty Museum, and the second year I was a consultant at the Getty Museum. And my department was the provenance index.” As an art history student at Leiden University, Pjer specialized in 17th century Dutch art and iconology. “And as an extra, one of my teachers said ‘I think it’s a good idea to study the Dutch inventories.’ So I did that. I went to Amsterdam and I saw the famous artist inventories like Rembrandt.”
Provenance?: “When you die, you have a notary make [a list of] your possessions. So you can have one painting from that guy which is in that room and another in that room … and in those old inventories it’s basically just [a list of] what was in the house. So we scan them for the different type of paintings which are there. And this way you can check the provenance of paintings. And of course my job at the Getty was to check the provenance of the Getty paintings. That was the foremost part. But apart from that, we did it for all the museums and for all the big collections.”
Tracing a painting’s provenance allows experts to check “that it’s original. Because when you have the provenance, from the maker to the present, then you know it’s original. There’s no way that it can be faked … And a lot of famous paintings have holes in their provenance. That’s what we would be working on. Trying to fix those holes. And what you do is you check old auction catalogues and old books to see if you could find that and foremost the old inventories.”
When checking for authenticity, the “most interesting of course are the more famous paintings, because that’s what everybody’s interested in. But you don’t find those easily because a lot of people have been plowing the same fields. But what you do find is incidental things … I have a very, very good memory. What they call a visual memory. If I see something, I remember the composition.”
“When I came back from the United States after two years, I started to work as an arts detective here in Holland. It’s called Rijksdienst voor de Beeldende Kunst. It was in The Hague … It was a wonderful job. I would sit all day and I would just go through auction catalogues. And to prepare for this, I had this huge binder full of stolen art from the Second World War … five years after the Second World War, 80 percent of the stolen art was back to where it came from … they did a good job. But of course 20 percent remains [missing]. Some of it was gone forever, and some of it was taken by the Canadians, the Americans, the Russians … So what I would try to do is find where the paintings are now. And I had a success ratio which doesn’t sound like very much. It was three per thousand. But my job was just to locate [a painting] … and then I would give it to the diplomatic services, and then they would do the rest … I just pointed out that this painting could be that painting.”
When Pjer initially applied for work as an arts detective with the Rijksdienst voor de Beeldende Kunst (RBK), he was very well qualified. But he wasn’t invited for an interview. So he called the RBK and learned that a woman had been hired for the job. A representative of the RBK told Pjer that “’because of positive discrimination, we chose her over you’ … And they actually did admit that they did that because they wanted to have more women. As a matter of fact I think of myself as a feminist, so I can very well understand that. I think it’s a good reason. But then they said ‘would you consider coming to work for us and show her the ropes?’ That was very funny. But I thought, ‘yeah, sure why not, it’s a job.’ And so that’s what I did for three days a week. And the rest of the days I worked at Christie’s, the auction house in Amsterdam.”
Pjer grew up in Limburgh. “As a child I wanted to be a grave robber. That was my thing. I soon realized that wasn’t officially a job. [laughs] And then I thought that second best would be [to become] an archaeologist. I wanted actually to be an Egyptologist. And so I started studying archaeology. But then I found that archaeology was very dry.” Pjer attended Leiden University, and ended up with a master’s degree in art history. “In the first year you have archaeology and art history together. And I found that history of art was way more interesting.”
He was hired by the Getty Museum before he finished his master’s program. “I have to say my professor at that time was instrumental in getting me that job … he had knowledge about what kind of person they would be needing at the Getty at a certain time. And he said ‘if you concentrate on … the inventories in Amsterdam and in Antwerp, then you will have a good chance [of getting a job with the Getty].’ And so that’s what I did. He wrote me a very good [reference] letter. And so I got picked.”
Pjer enjoyed living in Los Angeles, and still enjoys regaling listeners about his encounters with such celebrities as Madonna, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Walter Matthau and Robert Wagner. “I liked that a lot living there, to meet all these people.”
He returned to the Netherlands after two years due to “the most simple thing in the world: my wife … We were friends [but] not a pair when I left for the States. But when I was there she came over to visit me. She said she wanted to come over to live in the States if I could find her a job.” But it wasn’t possible for Marian to obtain a U.S. work visa. “So I returned home,” and Pjer and Marian were soon hitched.
A passion for vintage watches: “When I was 14 years old I already had six watches. And they were always lying next to my bed in a specific order. The order was the one I bought most recently was closest to my bed. When I went to the United States I started collecting vintage wrist watches. Because of the mechanism. I really liked that. Because of all the beautiful stuff in there. There’s gold in there and diamonds and rubies. And I really liked that. As a child I already used to take watches apart. But then I couldn’t put them back together again, so I would just keep the parts in a jar. And then when I went to the States I had a very good income from the Getty, and so I went to these different watch guys and also the flea markets like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and I would buy vintage wrist watches from them. And when I came back to Holland … I worked for the government and for Christie’s, but my income was not as high as in the United States. So I thought let’s keep the hobby but … what I did was I advertised to buy broken watches. Because a broken watch is way cheaper than a running watch.”
“And over the years I’ve been doing that … I can repair very, very complicated watches. I have a complete watch atelier at my house, with all the tools that you could need, even a watch-making lathe … What I really like to do is restore watches. Like getting watches which are in bad shape and making them good again … the more complicated, the more interesting. Because that’s what you strive for, you want to do the difficult things. I can probably put a watch together blind-folded. But then you have the chronograph watches which are more complicated, and then you have the watches with chronograph and calendar, and chronograph and calendar and hours and minutes repeating.”
“And then I found out that in order to get better pieces you have to sell part of your collection. And so that’s the business part.” Pjer sells some of the vintage watches he buys and repairs via an app he developed, called Watchcraft. “I try to … consolidate my collection … I always want to keep the best things for my own collection.”
What will become of his watch collection?: “My brother says he wants to have fun with the watches … I don’t know if he will outlive me. For my wife I have made an app, and on the app it has all the different watches I have, and it also has the story about each watch and the actual price at the moment. I have a lot of friends who collected watches who died already and they did not have that, and so their wives had a problem with selling the watches … I really hope I will live long enough to sell the watches … And of course it would be nice if my nephews and nieces would have a watch.”
When he dies, Pjer doesn’t want to leave any traces behind: “I’ve thought a lot about it … I don’t think that a lot of people are interesting enough to be remembered. And I consider myself one of these people … I remember my boss at the Getty, that was his big thing, to leave something behind … ‘These are my children’ he would say [referring to] his publications. And then he said ‘this is what I leave behind, this is my name.’ … But I thought ‘I don’t want to leave anything.’”
“Imagine yourself. You have a daughter. And when you die your daughter will remember you. And then maybe your children will remember you. And then if your children’s children will remember you it’s vague. But it really doesn’t matter does it? … My brother visits my parents’ grave a lot. I’ve been there once. Because this is not where my parents are. My parents live in my head every day, and you don’t really need a grave or anything to be there. But of course I can understand other people who do that.”
Pjer’s brother is married to his wife’s sister. “So it’s two brothers who are married to two sisters … and I think it’s very funny to see their children because those are the children my wife and I would have had if we had children.”
“I think a lot of people live in a certain kind of typecast. There’s a typecast for how to live. You live and you have children, and then you work ,and then you retire and then you die. This is just the typecast of our life, the story of a normal life … But you don’t have to live like that. You can live anyway you like.”
The Koffiehuisje is located at Gerecht 2 in Leiden, across from the Gravensteen. Information about the café and sandwich bar is available at www.koffiehuisje.com.
