Johannes Esser

Jan Esser (1902)

Johannes Fredericus Samuel Esser (born October 13, 1877 in Leiden ; † August 9, 1946 in Chicago ) was a Dutch doctor , chess master and art collector.

youth

At the age of 20 he began studying medicine at the University of Leiden . While he was helping his sister, who was studying dentistry there , with the exam preparation, he took up all the curriculum himself and in 1903 passed not only the medical but also the dental exam. He was initially a ship's doctor, from 1905 to 1913 he worked as a family doctor in Amsterdam .

Divergent talents

Chess passion

Esser was a very versatile man; one of his passions was the game of chess , which he mastered at a master level. In the years before the First World War, he was considered one of the leading players in the Netherlands. In 1910 he defeated the then world class player David Janowski in Paris in a short competition with 2.5-0.5. Esser took part in the first two official national championships in 1909 and 1912, at the second tournament he was runner-up. In 1913 he defeated Rudolf Loman , the reigning Dutch champion, in a competition in Amsterdam with a score of 3.5-0.5 and thus took the championship from him. The German world chess champion Emanuel Lasker was among his circle of friends .

Esser's best historical rating was 2570, which he achieved in September 1913.

Art collector

His love for art was of great importance. When he became a family doctor in Amsterdam in 1905, the then important painters George Hendrik Breitner and Jan Sluijters were among his patients. He often visited the leading Amsterdam artist society "Sociëteit Arti et Amicitiae" ( Latin for art and friendship "). Through purchase or exchange, he acquired around 880 paintings throughout his life, including later works by then controversial artists such as Léo Gestel and Piet Mondriaan . His collection was first exhibited in 2006 in the Singer Museum in Laren (North Holland) .

Money speculation

Esser grew his fortune by trading real estate and investing and speculating on the stock market .

Medical pioneer, idealist and loner

Esser prosthetic face for a war wounded man

In 1913, Esser decided to switch to surgery . With his knowledge of dentistry, he specialized in the restoration of facial mutilations. He sold his practice and studied war surgery in Paris for some time. In part he did it out of idealism: he wanted to repair the damage done to his patients by the acts of war as best he could; At that time the medical professionals hardly concerned themselves with it. When the French refused to hire him as a war doctor, he entered the service of Austria-Hungary after the outbreak of the First World War . In Brno, today's Brno , he did an excellent job and developed methods and therapies of plastic surgery in practice . Esser is regarded as one of the pioneers in this branch of medicine, particularly in the area of ​​reconstructive surgery. He performed many difficult surgeries, wrote articles in professional journals, and even wrote a book on plastic surgery. The University of Berlin , where he lived from 1917 to 1924, even awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1918 , although he never passed the exams that officially allowed him to work as a surgeon in a hospital.

A year after the inflation crisis in 1923, when he got very rich through wise speculation and cheap property purchases, he left Germany and returned to the Netherlands.

Like many of his contemporaries, he was greatly shocked by the First World War. For some time he lived on the proceeds of his fortune. Then he tried to realize a very strange ideal: the "Surgical Free State". Esser wanted to own a small area of ​​land in Europe that was completely independent under international law , and where he could treat anyone injured in the war without regard to nationality or race. In the meantime he was wandering all over Europe, doing operations and giving lectures. In the end, only Greece was ready to give Esser a remote island. However, when he was given the condition that the Greek police should be authorized to enforce order, he rejected this in the deepest disappointment. He emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. In 1940 he lost almost all of his fortune through speculation, and through bankruptcy also lost the management of his numerous houses and works of art. He then lived on the income from his lectures. In 1943 he "occupied" a house destined for demolition in Chicago , where he died in 1946.

literature

• In 2006 a biography of him was published in Dutch: Author: Maryken Jonckman; Title: De onstuitbare verzamelaar JFS Esser; ISBN 90-400-9123-4 . The book will put emphasis on Esser's work as an art collector.
• Esser's book was reissued in 2003 as a facsimile , in English: Artery Flaps , publisher: Erasmus Publishing Rotterdam, ISBN 90-5235-160-0 .