Background
Adriaan van der Hoop was the son of Joan Cornelis van der Hoop, secretary of the Sociëteit van Suriname, prosecutor for the Admiralty of Amsterdam and Minister of the Navy.
banker politician art collector
Adriaan van der Hoop was the son of Joan Cornelis van der Hoop, secretary of the Sociëteit van Suriname, prosecutor for the Admiralty of Amsterdam and Minister of the Navy.
Adriaan studied law in Groningen and Kiel, when it was still a Danish city.
In his later years he became an important art and plant collector. On his death he left 250 paintings to the city of Amsterdam, who could barely pay the inheritance tax In this way Van der Hoop contributed substantially to the collection of the Rijksmuseum.
(New Brunswick Holland was occupied by the French army between 1795 – 1813).
With his Danish passport he traveled through Germany and England. In 1811, he was hired by the firm Hope & Company, for years an important lender to the Russian state.
Back in Holland in 1814 Adriaan van der Hoop was involved in the setting up of the Constitution and accompanied emperor Alexander I of Russia on his visit to Holland. The day after the verdict, four years later, Clifford committed suicide with a pistol.
Adriaan raised rare plants on his country estate Spaarnberg, near Santpoort.
There he grew 120 kinds of South African Erica. He had two blossoming agaves and ten kinds of orchids. The country house was designed by January David Zocher, who on van der Hoop"s request also designed a new stock exchange in Amsterdam.
Adriaan owned racehorses and in 1832 he started to collect art objects on a large scale.
Adriaan bought works by contemporary painters, including January Adam Kruseman, Johannes Christianus Schotel and Barend Cornelis Koekkoek. His collection of paintings - which he had partly inherited, included items by Vermeer, Ruisdael, Rembrandt, January Steen and Adriaen van der Werff, and could be visited by appointment at his house on Keizersgracht 444.
He had bought this house in 1822.
He also was an influential politician: a member of the city council, the States-Provincial in Haarlem and the Senate in The Hague.