Adriaan van der Willigen

Adriaan van der Willigen (1766, Rotterdam – 1841, Haarlem) was a Dutch writer of plays and travelogues who is mostly remembered today for his comprehensive list of painter biographies.

He was born in Rotterdam, but six months later his mother died and he was raised by her sister in Haarlem, where he learned to draw and enjoyed literature and theater. He later moved back to Rotterdam at age 16 to live with his strict Calvinist father, who did not allow him to attend the theater, and where he was set to work as a clerk in a merchant's office. He became a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and escaped his father's house a year and a half later in 1785 to join the Dutch Republican Army, and was stationed along the Waal (river) in Nijmegen, Grave, and Venlo. There he was free to pursue his literary and theatrical interests, but when he was sent in 1787 to Den Bosch to quell the plundering there, he was disgusted by plundering troops. This made him less and less royalist and more and more in sympathy with the patriots. He was eventually dismissed in 1789, because of his increasing sympathy for the patriot movement. He first moved to Oss where he tried his hand at farming with modern agricultural techniques, and three years after a trip to Belgium, he settled in Tilburg, where he became Drossaard (chief justice) in 1795. During the French occupation he became charged with the conscription of young men into the French army, and was embarrassed by requests from family and friends to protect their sons. He quit his position in 1802 and moved to Paris, where he became less and less enamored of the French patriots. In 1804 he made another long journey through France and in 1805 he travelled through Italy, Switzerland, and Germany on his way back to Haarlem, where he settled for good. He busied himself with his work on art, while continuing to plan trips, which he mostly made in the company of a friend or relative. Many of his traveloques were published. His writings show his political development, and illustrate how he went from being an Orangist to a Patriot, and then became an Orangist again. He felt strongly that Belgium and Holland belonged together and was heavily disappointed when Belgium seceded from the union in 1830.

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