Richard Roland Holst: Life, Posters, Stained Glass & Art Prints
The Dutch Symbolist who put art to work for everyone. The story of Richard Nicolaus Roland Holst from the 1892 Van Gogh cover to the Lucifer poster, the union murals and the windows of Utrecht Cathedral, with where to see the originals and how to hang Richard Roland Holst art prints at home. By Artwork Culture.
Richard Nicolaus Roland Holst (1868–1938) was the Dutch artist who believed art should serve everyone. Trained as a painter in Amsterdam, he turned away from easel pictures in the early 1890s and gave his life to what the Dutch call gemeenschapskunst, community art: posters, book covers, wall paintings for trade unions, stained-glass windows for churches and public buildings. His designs, in a calm, monumental Symbolist style, set the look of Dutch graphic art for a generation, and his cover for the first Vincent van Gogh exhibition in 1892 is one of the first memorials to that painter.
This guide covers his life, how to recognise his style, the stories behind his best-known works, where to see the originals and how to hang his designs at home. Our Richard Roland Holst collection holds 318 archival art prints, most of them from the drawings and designs he left to the Rijksmuseum, from the Lucifer theatre poster to his window designs for Utrecht Cathedral.
Who Was Richard Roland Holst?
Richard Roland Holst was a painter, draughtsman, lithographer, woodcut artist, book designer, glass designer and writer. He is often called a gemeenschapskunstenaar, a community artist, because he thought art should decorate the places people share, a union hall, a theatre, a court, a church, rather than hang in private drawing rooms. He worked closely with architects, poets, printers and theatre makers, and his style was built for that teamwork: clear outlines, flat colour and solemn, simplified figures that read well on a wall or a poster. Browse our Richard Roland Holst art prints and you will see that most of his surviving work is design: sketches, cartoons and proofs for things meant to be built or printed.
How to spot a Roland Holst:
- Monumental figures: grave, heavy-limbed workers, saints and allegories, drawn with firm contours and little shading, as in De bouwmeester (The Master Builder).
- Lettering built into the picture: hand-drawn capitals frame the image like architecture, as in the Lucifer poster or the cover for De Architect.
- Geometry and symmetry: stars, circles, arches and mirrored layouts, as in his Wendingen cover of 1918.
- Earthy colour: ochre, brick red, olive and black rather than bright tones, as in the Beurs design De Industrie.
- Stained-glass thinking: even his drawings look leaded, with forms split into flat pieces, as in his window for the Dutch pavilion in Paris, 1925.
- A social message: work, freedom and solidarity are recurring themes, as in the design Vrijheid (Freedom) for the Diamond Workers’ Union.
From Impressionism to Symbolism
Rik Roland Holst was born in Amsterdam on 4 December 1868. His father, Adriaan, was a manufacturer and insurance underwriter, and his mother was Sabina Posthumus, whom he later drew in a quiet portrait. His nephew, also called Adriaan Roland Holst, became one of the best-known Dutch poets of the twentieth century. From 1885 to 1890 he studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, where his teachers included August Allebé.
His first pictures were Impressionist, in the manner of the Amsterdam painters of the 1880s: dark, broadly brushed landscapes and farm scenes such as Corner of a Pond near Breukelen, Orchard at Eemnes, Landscape by Moonlight and Resting Cow with a Mill, and city views like Building Site in Amsterdam. He painted his friend the painter Jan Verkade at work outdoors in Jan Verkade Painting under a Tree at Hattem; Verkade later joined the Nabis in Paris.
Around 1890 he changed course. Reading the English designer William Morris and following the Dutch artist Antoon Derkinderen, he came to see art as a service, a craft that should be pure in form and useful to society. He also drew the people of the Gooi villages east of Amsterdam, simply and almost without shadow: Home Weaver from Laren (1892), Girl from Huizen at a Window (1895) and a standing Huizen girl in red chalk.
The 1892 Van Gogh Exhibition Cover
In 1892, two years after Vincent van Gogh’s death, Roland Holst helped organise an exhibition of his work at the Kunstzaal Panorama in Amsterdam and designed the catalogue cover. The lithograph shows a withered sunflower drooping in a dark landscape, a halo above its head and the name “Vincent” written at the lower left. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which owns a copy, reads it as a memorial: the sunflower stands for the painter, turned from the setting sun to suggest his early death, while the halo marks him as a kind of saint.
His catalogue introduction argued that the crowd dismisses art it cannot sell. Yet he could be sharp about Van Gogh’s champions too: in letters he mocked Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the painter’s sister-in-law, who was working to make Vincent known, accusing her of turning him into a god. The same year he designed the cover for the 1892 catalogue of a selective exhibition of contemporary Dutch art. If you love Van Gogh, browse our Vincent van Gogh prints alongside it.
Henriëtte, Socialism and the Union Murals
In the early 1890s Roland Holst fell in love with the poet Henriëtte van der Schalk, whom he drew again and again: seated in a garden in a pencil study inscribed 1893, in a garden at Noordwijk, lying back in a chair and in the etched portrait of 1898, resting her head in her hand. They married on 16 January 1896 and had no children. In 1898 they published a book together on the English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
In 1897 the couple joined the social democrats, encouraged by their friend the poet Herman Gorter. Henriëtte became a leading writer of the Dutch left; Rik put his art at the movement’s service. He drew figures from the Hogerhuis case, a famous campaign of the 1890s against the conviction of three Frisian brothers, including their mother sitting up in bed, and made prints for May Day, such as 1 mei, and satire, such as Tsar Nicholas II riding the Russian bear.
His biggest commission came from the Algemene Nederlandse Diamantbewerkersbond (ANDB), the diamond workers’ union, whose Amsterdam headquarters was built by the architect H. P. Berlage in 1898–1900 and is now called the Burcht van Berlage. Roland Holst painted murals for the building, reproduced in a book of fifteen plates in 1907; those in the board room include De diepe uren and De zachte uren (The Deep Hours and The Gentle Hours). Our collection has his design Vrijheid (Freedom) for the union building and the print for the union’s tenth anniversary in 1904, a worker standing before the city at night.
He also made designs for Berlage’s Amsterdam stock exchange, the Beurs van Berlage, where his allegories show trade and industry as human labour: De Industrie, with workers at a furnace, and De Handel (Trade), with porters carrying sacks.
Posters, Covers and Book Design
Roland Holst was one of the founders of modern Dutch graphic design. He designed book bindings, such as the cover for Louis Couperus’s novel Extaze, with its sweeping Art Nouveau lettering; the typography of Henriëtte’s poems; and bindings for his own essays, Over Kunst. His posters and covers turned lettering into architecture, as in the poster for the Pulchri Studio drawing society, the Concertgebouw programme, the 1912 Ideal Home Exhibition catalogue and the 1911 cover for De Architect.
For the magazine Wendingen, the voice of the Amsterdam School architects, he designed the 1918 cover, a star and a framed figure in white line on black, also printed in red, and a cover for its woodcarvers’ issue. Other commissions came from business and charity: a poster for De Centrale workers’ insurance (1912), a charity calendar for 1917 and ex libris for private collectors.
If you like his posters, compare the other Dutch Art Nouveau and Symbolist designers in our store: Jan Toorop, Theo van Hoytema, Chris Lebeau and Johan Thorn Prikker, or the Paris posters in our Alphonse Mucha guide.
Lucifer and the Theatre
In 1910 the actor and director Willem Royaards staged Joost van den Vondel’s 1654 tragedy Lucifer, the great Dutch drama of the angels’ revolt, with his company N.V. Het Tooneel. Roland Holst designed the sets, the costumes and the poster, with music by Hubert Cuypers. The colour lithograph, about 127 by 75 centimetres and printed by Tresling & Co., shows the fallen angel as a dark, upright figure framed by columns and tongues of fire, and is one of the best-known Dutch posters of its time. Copies are in the Rijksmuseum and the Kröller-Müller Museum.
The same year he designed Marsyas, of de betooverde bron, a “mythical comedy” by Balthazar Verhagen with music by Alphons Diepenbrock, for which he drew both a red poster and a second, lettered version, as well as a printed programme for Het Tooneel. Our collection includes his costume designs for Lucifer, Apollo and other gods and nymphs, a figure study for the Lucifer poster, and his poster for Royaards’ production of Goethe’s Faust.
Teacher, Writer and Stained-Glass Artist
In 1918 Roland Holst became a professor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, opening with a lecture on the ethical side of monumental painting, and from 1926 to 1934 he was its director. He also wrote: essays on art and artists, studies of Puvis de Chavannes, a book on the Rijksmuseum’s architect Pierre Cuypers, and a much-loved collection of musings, Overpeinzingen van een bramenzoeker (Thoughts of a Blackberry Picker, 1923). For many years he sat on the editorial board of the cultural magazine De Gids.
In these years stained glass became his main art. He designed seven windows for the Amsterdam Lyceum between 1920 and 1927, a Mercury window for the post office in Utrecht (1924), windows for the Dutch pavilion at the 1925 Paris decorative arts exhibition and designs for Amsterdam city hall (1930). His greatest glass is in Utrecht Cathedral, the Dom, which received two windows, in 1926 and 1936. The Rijksmuseum holds dozens of his chalk and brush designs for the north transept window, dated around 1934; our collection has more than sixty of them, from full figures to the carpet-like pattern for its borders.
Among the most striking of these designs is a window for the 1925 Paris pavilion, two figures embracing in a mosaic of blue and violet glass.
The Supreme Court and the Last Years
From about 1926 until his death, Roland Holst was in a relationship with the artist Debora Duyvis, though he and Henriëtte remained married. Summers were spent at the Buissche Heide, Henriëtte’s estate near Achtmaal in North Brabant, where he had a studio and where they received friends such as Berlage, Gorter and the painter Charley Toorop.
His last big commission came in 1936: a marble wall decoration for the main courtroom of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands (Hoge Raad) on the Plein in The Hague, with relief figures of great lawgivers, among them Moses, Solon, Justinian and Napoleon. Our collection has his head of the blindfolded Justice and the fourth and fifth designs for the whole wall. He died in Bloemendaal on 31 December 1938, aged 70.
Legacy: The Community Artist
Roland Holst left his drawings, designs and prints to the Rijksmuseum, and the bequest, shown in a 1979 exhibition, is the reason so many of his sketches survive. In Amsterdam he still stands on the bridge where the Parnassusweg crosses the Zuider Amstelkanaal: the sculptor Hildo Krop carved him with palette and brush beside Berlage and the sculptor Joseph Mendes da Costa in 1940–41, but the German occupiers stopped the statue going up, and it was unveiled only on 17 April 1957.
His idea that artists, architects and craftsmen should work together for society fed into the Amsterdam School and Dutch design of the 1920s. For the other direction Dutch art took, the pure abstraction of De Stijl, read our Piet Mondrian guide. For his circle and influences, see Antoon Derkinderen, Jan Toorop, Jan Veth, Willem Witsen, George Hendrik Breitner, Matthijs Maris, Jan Mankes, about whom he wrote, William Morris and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
Famous Richard Roland Holst Works
Ten works to start with, all in our collection:
Lucifer
Lucifer, Treurspel van Vondel, 1910, colour lithograph poster. The rebel angel between columns of fire, for Royaards’ Het Tooneel. Our hero image.
Van Gogh cover
Catalogue cover for the Van Gogh exhibition, 1892. A withered sunflower under a halo, one of the first tributes to Vincent.
Wendingen
Wendingen cover, 1918. Symbolism meets the geometry of the Amsterdam School; also in red.
Diamond Workers’ print
Print for the tenth anniversary of the ANDB, 1904. A worker above the city at night, a hymn to the labour movement.
De Industrie
De Industrie, design for the Beurs van Berlage. Workers at the furnace in an arched panel; see also De Handel.
Marsyas
Marsyas, Mythische Komedie, 1910, poster. A satyr and a nymph in red and gold for Verhagen’s play with music by Diepenbrock.
Utrecht Dom window
Design for a window in the north transept of Utrecht Cathedral, c. 1934. One of more than sixty sheets for his greatest work in glass; see also the Frederik van Sierck chapel design.
Henriëtte, 1898
Portrait of Henriëtte Roland Holst-van der Schalk, 1898. The poet, his wife, in fine etched lines.
Extaze
Binding for Louis Couperus, Extaze, een boek van geluk. Flowing Art Nouveau lettering on pale blue.
Blindfolded Justice
Head of the blindfolded Justitia, design for the Supreme Court in The Hague. From his last great commission.
What Our Richard Roland Holst Prints Show
Our Richard Roland Holst collection holds 318 prints. Most come from the drawings, designs and proofs he left to the Rijksmuseum, so the collection is a look inside his workshop: almost a third are designs for stained glass, chiefly for Utrecht Cathedral, and many more are figure studies for murals, windows and posters. Alongside them are the finished posters, covers and ex libris, portraits of his family and friends, and the early landscapes.
For a classic Roland Holst wall, pick one from each side of his work: the Lucifer poster for the theatre, the Van Gogh cover for his Symbolist beginnings, De Industrie for the murals and a window design for the glass.
Where to See Richard Roland Holst’s Work
Most of Roland Holst’s work was made for buildings, so much of it is still where he put it: in union halls, a cathedral and a stock exchange. His drawings and designs are in the Rijksmuseum, where works on paper are shown only for short spells, so check the website before you go.
The main places to look:
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Holds his bequest: hundreds of drawings, window designs, posters and proofs, including both copies of the 1892 Van Gogh cover and the Lucifer poster. Works on paper are shown in rotation, but most can be seen online.
Burcht van Berlage, Amsterdam
The former Diamond Workers’ Union building on the Henri Polaklaan, with his murals in the board room, largely restored after being covered over for years. Check its website for tours.
Utrecht Cathedral (Domkerk), Utrecht
His two windows, of 1926 and 1936, are his greatest work in glass.
Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam
Berlage’s stock exchange, for which he made allegorical designs of trade and industry; now a venue for events and exhibitions.
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Owns a copy of the 1910 Lucifer poster.
Oude Buisse Heide, Achtmaal
The estate where the couple spent their summers, given by Henriëtte to the nature trust Natuurmonumenten in 1945. His studio still stands there, and a walking route follows places from her poems.
Parnassusweg bridge, Amsterdam
Hildo Krop’s statue of Roland Holst with Berlage and Mendes da Costa, unveiled in 1957, on the bridge over the Zuider Amstelkanaal.
How to Decorate with Richard Roland Holst Prints
- Living room: the posters make a strong focal point: Lucifer, Marsyas or Faust, framed large.
- Hallway or entrance: the window designs glow like stained glass on a wall: try the 1925 Paris pavilion window, a city hall window or a south transept design.
- Home office or library: covers and lettering suit a bookish room: Wendingen, De Architect, Extaze or the Concertgebouw programme.
- Bedroom: the quiet drawings of Henriëtte, such as the 1898 portrait, or the gentle Portrait of Harpje, Aged 15 (1895).
- A gallery wall: group six or eight Utrecht window sheets in matching thin black frames; their shared colours and lead lines make a striking set.
- Frames and sizes: dark oak or black frames suit his earthy colour; a wide cream mat flatters the pencil and chalk studies. Posters look best large (24×36 inches and up), drawings at 11×14 to 18×24 inches.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Richard Nicolaus Roland Holst?
Richard Nicolaus Roland Holst (1868–1938) was a Dutch painter, graphic designer, muralist, stained-glass artist and writer. A leading Dutch Symbolist, he designed posters, book covers, union murals and church windows, and directed the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 1926 to 1934.
What art movement was Richard Roland Holst part of?
He is counted among the Dutch Symbolists and is closely tied to Dutch Art Nouveau (Nieuwe Kunst) and the community-art movement inspired by William Morris. He began as an Impressionist, and his later covers for Wendingen link him to the Amsterdam School.
What is Richard Roland Holst’s most famous work?
His best-known works are the 1910 poster for Vondel’s Lucifer, staged by Willem Royaards’ Het Tooneel; the 1892 catalogue cover for the first Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam, with its withered sunflower; his murals for the Diamond Workers’ Union; and his stained-glass windows for Utrecht Cathedral.
Was Richard Roland Holst married to Henriëtte Roland Holst?
Yes. He married the poet Henriëtte van der Schalk on 16 January 1896, and she became known as Henriëtte Roland Holst-van der Schalk. Both joined the social democrats in 1897. They had no children.
What did Roland Holst have to do with Van Gogh?
In 1892 he helped organise an exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s work at the Kunstzaal Panorama in Amsterdam and designed its catalogue cover: a drooping sunflower under a halo, signed “Vincent”, read as a memorial to the painter.
Where can I see Richard Roland Holst’s work?
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds his bequest of drawings, designs and prints. His murals survive in the Burcht van Berlage in Amsterdam, his windows in Utrecht Cathedral, and a copy of the Lucifer poster is in the Kröller-Müller Museum.
What sizes do your Richard Roland Holst art prints come in?
Our 318 Richard Roland Holst prints are archival art prints available from 4×6 to 40×60 inches. The posters and window designs look best large, while the pencil and chalk studies suit small and medium sizes with a wide mat.
Written by Artwork Culture. Image credits: all artwork images are Artwork Culture product photos of Richard Roland Holst prints from our collection; museum names give where the originals are. Facts follow Wikipedia (English and Dutch, October 2026), Wikidata, the DBNL, and the collection notes of the Rijksmuseum, the Kröller-Müller Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Natuurmonumenten for the Oude Buisse Heide.