S.H. de Roos
Encyclopedia
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
type designer, book cover
Book cover
A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older forms such as the nineteenth-century "paper-boards" and...
designer and artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
.
De Roos was born in Drachten
Drachten
Drachten is a Dutch town, located in the municipality of Smallingerland in the province of Friesland.-Beginnings:Drachten began as a small community on the east side of the Drait River. There, early settlers started draining the land to use it for agriculture...
to a cobbler, but moved to Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
at an early age. It was here that, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, he trained to be a lithographer
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
.
Later he studied at the Teekenschool voor Kunstambachten (The School of Drawing for the Arts and Crafts), part of the Rijksakademie
Rijksakademie
The Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten is a two-year residency for visual artists, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Funded by the Dutch government, residents are granted a stipend and are allotted a personal studio in the former military barracks building in which the Rijksakademie is housed...
. In his early years De Roos was inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement
Arts and Crafts movement
Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...
. An example of this can be found in his edition of Kunst en Maatschappij (Art and Society (1903)). As a supporter of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
Ferdinand Jacobus Domela Nieuwenhuis was the Netherlands' first prominent socialist. He was a Lutheran preacher who, after he lost his faith, started a political fight for workers. He was the first socialist in the Dutch parliament.Nieuwenhuis was born in Amsterdam. His family added the second...
, De Roos attempted to create the ideal of ‘Art to the People’.
Between 1907 and 1947 he was employed by the Amsterdam Type foundry
Amsterdam Type foundry
The Amsterdam Type foundry was a Dutch type foundry which contributed a number of original type designs early in the 20th century. It eventually became a division of Tetterode. On October 1, 2000, Tetterode transferred the rights for all their typefaces to Linotype...
(known previously as N. Tetterode), where he further developed his lithographic skills. During this period he designed, a new type face, the Hollandsche Mediæval, the first Dutch made typeface for 150 years. In total De Roos designed twelve type faces, the most successful being the Hollandsche mediæval, the Egmont, the Libra and the De Roos Roman and Italic.
Archive material, as well as the Tetterode Collection both attributed to De Roos, are available at the Library of the University of Amsterdam. Further archives are available at the City Library of Haarlem
Haarlem
Haarlem is a municipality and a city in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of North Holland, the northern half of Holland, which at one time was the most powerful of the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic...
, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Frans Hals Museum
Frans Hals Museum
The Frans Hals Museum is a hofje and municipal museum in Haarlem, Netherlands. The museum was founded in 1862 in the newly renovated former cloister located in the back of the Haarlem city hall known as the Prinsenhof...
in Haarlem and the Museum Smallingerland in Drachten.
Literature
- A.A.M. Stols, Het werk van S. H. de Roos: een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de herleving der Nederlandsche boekdrukkunst (1942)
- Dick Dooijes, Sjoerd H. de Roos zoals ik mij hem herinner (1976)
- Sjoerd H. de Roos, Typografische geschriften 1907-1920 (1989)
- Mathieu Lommen, De grote vijf: S.H. de Roos, J.F. van Royen, J. van Krimpen, C. Nypels en A.A.M. Stols (1991)
- Sari de Haan ... [et al.], typiScH de Roos: oeuvre-overzicht (2004)