Book review: Art collector, surgeon and chess player Johannes Esser is buried in a cemetery for the poor

Johannes Esser (1877-1946) was a wonderful man. After studying medicine, he worked as a doctor in Hazerswoude and Hilvarenbeek. He founded a chess club and had a chess section in it Algemeen Handelsblad, became the first official chess champion of the Netherlands in 1903 and then left as a ship’s doctor to Suriname, Venezuela and New York. After these wanderings he settled on the Willemsparkweg in Amsterdam. There he had patients who paid with art. This is how he came into possession of work by Piet Mondriaan, Jan Sluijters, Leo Gestel, George Hendrik Breitner, Jozef Israëls, Piet van der Hem and Anton Mauve.

Restless as he was, he left for Paris to train in war surgery. That was a specialty that came in handy during the First World War, with so many wounded soldiers. Through this work, Esser was at the forefront of reconstructive surgery, even though he did not complete his surgical studies. He wanted to establish a free state to give the thousands of war maimed a presentable appearance again.

Public-friendly

No wonder that Esser’s life and work is the subject of a biography for the third time. In 1983 Barend Haeseker obtained his PhD with an English-language book, twenty years later Ton Neelissen published a more audience-friendly biography and now David de Poel is published I want to be king. The versatile genius Johannes Esser.

De Poel is a special biographer. He previously wrote experimental biographies of René/Renate Stoute and of Frans Pointl, the latter of whom he was also an informal caregiver. He also has an intimate relationship with Esser, his girlfriend is Esser’s granddaughter. Not only because of that I want to be king a special book: ‘I decided to approach his life as a novelist and not as a scientific biographer, in order to be close to Jan Esser,’ he writes. There’s no arguing about taste.

Striving for a free state

In an explanation, De Poel explains that he did not want to invent anything. That was not necessary because Esser, the biographer writes, left behind three versions of his memoirs, as well as thousands of letters. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that Esser himself may have made up some things in those writings. Why that novel form? It would really have been a better book if De Poel had written a non-fiction book. He does list a general list of sources at the back, but nothing can be checked. That’s a shame, because if De Poel writes, for example, that Esser was never able to beat chess player Adolf Olland, you only have to go to Chessgames.com to see that Olland did indeed lose to him on August 28, 1902.

The great quest in Esser’s life, and De Poel makes this very clear, is his pursuit of a free state. He traveled all over the world and spoke to the heads of state of France, Portugal, Spain, England, Italy, Yugoslavia, Mexico and the United States. He always had an island in mind and tried to get it as a gift, all for the war maimed.

Greek island

He even spoke with Benito Mussolini five times to gain control of the San Marino enclave. In vain, although the fascist leader was impressed by Esser’s ‘toe-thumb transfer’, a method by which an amputated thumb was replaced by a toe. Conversely, appreciation was also great. “You only find such a man as prime minister once in a century or even in more than a century,” Esser wrote. He probably came closest to his dream in Greece, where he had his eye on the island of Kyra Panagia. But because two Greek police officers had to be stationed on the island, Esser dropped out. He wanted to be completely independent.

Amstel Hotel and Carré

He sold many works of art after the First World War and, according to De Poel, acquired more than 200 properties in Berlin, houses on Amsterdam’s Herengracht and Prinsengracht and the Amstel, but also shares in the Amsterdam Amstel Hotel and in Carré and a fortune of 2 million guilders (now more than thirteen million euros).

In 1940, the now 63-year-old Esser left for Chicago with his son Maarten. There he started speculating in shares of the aircraft manufacturer Boeing. The price fell drastically and he lost almost all his assets. Esser and his son henceforth lived in poverty. Strange, because as De Poel writes, many of his paintings resurfaced after the war, from a hidden storage place in his castle in France. In 2022, the Mondriaanhuis in Amersfoort purchased nine early works by Mondriaan from this Esser collection.

Delusions of grandeur

Esser suffered from delusions of grandeur. After the war, despite the pleas of his wife and children, he did not return to the Netherlands. He had to finish two books first, he said, one to “secure the future of humanity” and a voluminous book on the theory of evolution. He would not see the Netherlands again. In 1946 he fell dead after a stroke on the sidewalk in front of his house. He was buried in a cardboard box in a cemetery for the poor. Only 50 years later, son Maarten had a stone placed ‘approximately’ at the spot where he was buried with the text: ‘Johannes FS Esser, 1877-1946 – A structural surgeon‘.