Jop Ubbens
Jop Ubbens specialises in the period from 1780 to 1950, in works of artists from the Renaissance to the Romantics, from the Orientalists to the Hague School, from the Impressionists to the Avant Garde and from Fin de Siècle to the Modernists. Jop is especially fascinated by artists who travelled, who knew no boundaries, traveller-painters who journeyed far and wide, into darkest Africa, to Asia and to (South)America, in search of new subjects, new horizons and new light. One of Ubbens Art ‘s specialties is the Grand Tour painters and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During his career at Christie’s, Jop was instrumental in the sales by private collections of a painting by the famous French Impressionist Alfred Sisley, a work by the Indonesian Romantic Raden Saleh and an important Cornelis Springer painting of The Hague. One of his most recent discoveries is an oil painting by Jacob Maris and is artist colleague Frederik Hendrik Kaemmerer which was sold to the Dordrechts Museum.
Jop’s final thesis was a monograph about the Antwerp Mannerist Gillis Coignet. Thereafter he worked at his alma mater, the University of Utrecht, the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam before embarking on his career at Christie’s. He recently retired as Chairman of Christie’s Amsterdam after a thirty year career which also included stints in London, Jakarta and Singapore. He started as a nineteenth century specialist in European and South East Asian paintings and built Christie’s Amsterdam up to become an extremely successful organisation of 60 staff and experts. Under his dynamic leadership Christie’s auctioned the private collections of amongst others: Anton Philips, Anton Dreesmann, Piet and Ida Sanders, Jan and Monique des Bouvrie and the collection of the Scheringa Museum for Realism. During that time he gained a wealth of expertise and an enormous international network.
He has also always been more than willling to be the auctioneer for philanthropic causes including Stichting BIO and Human Right Watch, and a host of other organisations too numerous to mention here. Jop Ubbens is co-author of the monograph on the Belgian painter-traveller A.J. le Mayeur de Merpres. He blogs and publishes in magazines about nineteenth century artists such as Isaac Israels, B.C. Koekkoek, Albert Biestadt, Ger Adolfs, Alexander Hugo Bakker Korff, de Famars Testas and many others. He is regularly guest curator for the new art magazine See All This and for the past five years he has written a column for the glossy magazine LXRY about art and museums. He will shortly be commencing with a column in the Fine Art magazine Tableau. At least once a month on a Saturday morning Jop can be heard on the Dutch Business News Radio programme FD Personal On Air to give his views on the world of art and finance. Jop Ubbens is a member of the Advisory Board of the Frans Hals Museum/de Hallen in Haarlem (until 2018). He is a member of the Board of the Van Loon Museum, Amsterdam starting 2017, a member of the Advisory Board of the Turing Award (2018), a member of the Board of the Van Vlissingen Art Foundation, a member of the Board of the International Chamber Music Festival of Utrecht (2018), Chair of the recruitment committee of the of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra House (2018) and Chair of the Advisory Board of YIPArt. Boardmember Foundation Friends of the Painter H.J.Wolter, member of Supervisory Board SingerLaren.
In the second half of 2019, the publishers Balans will be publishing his book about his adventures and experiences in the art world.