Henry van de Velde

Henry Clemens van de Velde was born on 3 April 1863 in Belgium and started as a painter before turning to architecture and design. With Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, he became one of the founders of Art Nouveau in Belgium, then worked in Paris with Siegfried Bing, who ran the first Art Nouveau gallery there. The most important stretch of his career unfolded in Germany, where he became a major figure in the Jugendstil movement and exerted a decisive influence on German architecture and design at the beginning of the 20th century. He died on 15 October 1957, having spent nearly a century bending…