Accros from Amsterdam Rijksmuseum lies the world famous distict Spiegelkwartier – a historical neighborhood with over seventy specialised shops offering a wide variety of fine art and antiques. One of these shops is owned by the black antiques dealer named Hesdy Artist. In travel and leisure Paul Bellaart wrote a story about him (date unknow).
Paradox is a "very Dutch thing,'' an antiques dealer named Hesdy Artist explained to me the following afternoon, the two of us seated on plump bergères in a gallery he owns near the Spiegel-kwartier, Amsterdam's antiques district. "In one way, nobody in Holland wants to stand out,'' Artist says, alluding to the prevalent "act normal" ethos. In another, less overt sense, the Dutch, he explained, like it understood that beneath their very proper image an unruly spirit lies barely concealed.
Artist himself is a clear anomaly in some basic ways, at least professionally. "There are very few dark people in antiques sales in Holland,'' says the 37-year-old former banker, whose skin is the color of a ripe plum. "Maybe in Europe," he adds. "Maybe the world."
To browse through Artist's stock of Dutch copies of 18th-century French furniture, or 19th-century English copies of 17th-century Flemish silver, or 17th-century lithographs of old master paintings of slaves, is to conclude that his taste is far from the concerns of contemporary Netherlands designers. Yet it seemed to me that much of the Dutch output now captivating the international marketplace has something in common with Artist's interest in mining what appear to be exhausted veins of history.
The above was take from an article 'Going Dutch' by Paul Bellaart, published in Travel & Leisure (ch); www.travelandleisure.com
Read more on http://www.buku.nl/artist.html
It appears that Artist also sells black collect