The Chabot Museum is located in a villa in the Museumpark in Rotterdam. This villa was built in 1938 by order of the Kraaijeveld family. Just like Huis Sonneveld, a little further down the road, they designed both houses in the style of Het Nieuwe Bouwen. In 1976 a new floor was added to the house. The roof terrace changed into extra living space. The museum has been located here since 1993, and in October 2000 the villa was registered as a National Monument.
Chabot Museum
Hendrik Chabot was born in Sprang-Capelle and lived from 1894 to 1949. In 1906 the family moved to Rotterdam where he later followed a course at the Willem de Kooning Academy. At that time it was still called the Rotterdam Academy. At the age of 22, Henk opened his studio in Rotterdam and started making sculptures. Later on, Henk Chabot concentrated more on creating paintings. He is the co-founder of the artist group De Branding. At the age of forty, Henk opened a studio in Bergschenhoek.
Henk Chabot was at that time a well-known artist in the Netherlands while his name is not very well known nowadays. A statue of him, Zittend Boertje(sitting farmer), was stolen from a street in Almelo in 2011. A replica has put on the streets a few years later. Henk also made a painting for the captain’s cabin of the Dutch passenger ship Nieuw Amsterdam. Some of his works of art were lost when his brother Wim’s studio burned down.
The Chabot Museum has a collection consisting of more than four hundred and fifty objects. The art collection not only contains works of art by Chabot but also by his contemporaries from Rotterdam. Chabot’s War Collection consisted of twenty-six paintings. In 2018 a family gave them as a donation to the museum. Henk Chabot had a wish, and he wanted his paintings of the War Collection staying together. So his dream came true.
More things to do around the Chabot Museum
If you leave the museum on Jongkindtstraat, you will see Het Nieuw Instituut, a museum for architecture, design and digital culture, across the street. Three villas next to the Chabot museum stands House Sonneveld. Both the interior and the house from 1933 retained very well. In the Witte de Withstraat, at 350 meters, stands the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. A museum of modern art, not very large, but with regularly exciting exhibitions.
