Old drawings by ‘timid’ Herman Brood have surfaced

This article was last updated on December 11, 2024

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Old drawings by ‘timid’ Herman Brood have surfaced

Old drawings by Herman Brood have surfaced in Zwolle. These are cartoon-like illustrations that the singer and painter made for the school newspaper in 1962 at the age of 16.

It is more or less a coincidence that the drawings are now appearing, the broadcaster reports East. And that has everything to do with a lecture tonight in the city café and restaurant Het Refter in the medieval city center of Zwolle.

Immediately when she saw the announcement of the lecture, the daughter of Zwolle resident Hermen Overweg (80) took action. She remembered a conversation with her father in which it was mentioned that he had received lessons in the same Het Refter building more than sixty years ago. Her father was then attending the Secondary Handelsdagschool there together with Herman Brood (1946-2001).

Monks since 1300

Hermen Overweg himself still remembers that he and a number of others created the school newspaper Hermes at the time. “I had written a contribution about the history of the school building,” he says. The building has existed since 1300 and was once a monastery where monks sat.

When his history teacher read that story, he advised Overweg to publish it in different parts in the school newspaper. “And then you have to ask Herman Brood if he wants to make the drawings for that, he said,” said Overweg. “So I approached him. He was one or two grades lower. He was an extremely timid, inconspicuous boy. But he wanted to do it. And he also made nice drawings.”

“I still had two school newspapers in which everything was depicted and published. I am almost certain that this was the very first public expression of Brood. So in that respect it is special,” continues the Zwolle resident. The school newspaper had a circulation of only two hundred copies. How many of them are left over sixty years later?

Illustrator

For those in doubt, the drawings of monk life in the Het Refter building are really by the later hit singer and painter. Overweg: “His name is in the colophon of the school newspaper after ‘illustrator’.”

He has no doubts about its uniqueness. The trade school’s school newspaper had a circulation of only two hundred copies. No one knows how many of them are left more than sixty years later.

The drawings will of course be on display during the lecture tonight. What will happen to it next is still unknown. There is a Herman Brood Museum in Zwolle. But Overweg can also imagine that the drawings would be enlarged separately and hung in the city café. On location, because Brood drew everything at the time: the quiet room, library, kitchen and dining room.”