Kasper Niehaus

Kasper Niehaus was born on 29 October 1889 in Groningen, the Netherlands, and died on 29 April 1974 in Bergen, North Holland. He trained at the Academie Minerva in Groningen and, in Amsterdam, at the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, though no degrees or exact years of study are documented in the available sources.

Niehaus worked as a painter, draughtsman, and mural painter, producing portraits and other figurative works. He was also an art collector and the author of Levende Nederlandsche Kunst, and he built a long parallel career as an art critic, writing for the newspaper De Telegraaf, though the exact start and end years of that tenure are not confirmed in available sources. He is described in scholarly and institutional sources as a prominent Dutch art critic of his generation.

His own painting has drawn renewed museum attention through Het aardse paradijs van Kasper Niehaus, an exhibition documented by the museum network CODART for 2024 and 2025 that presented him jointly as painter, critic, and collector.

Niehaus occupies a double place in Dutch art history, as a figurative painter and as one of the most influential Dutch art critics of the interwar period. Scholarly and institutional sources describe him as a prominent contemporary critic and long-time columnist for De Telegraaf, rather than a marginal or purely rediscovered figure. His own paintings, at times overshadowed during his lifetime by that critical reputation, drew renewed museum attention through Het aardse paradijs van Kasper Niehaus, an exhibition documented by CODART for 2024 and 2025 that framed him as a painter, critic, and collector in his own right rather than solely as a commentator on other artists' work.

Niehaus's auction market is small and only partly documented. Christie's auction database lists three results for the artist, and the market aggregator Art.Salon reports a top auction result of about EUR 22,500, though the underlying work, auction house, and sale date behind that figure are not published and could not be independently confirmed for this profile. Available sources do not support a precise count of total auction appearances or a fully documented sale history. Given this thin and partly undocumented sales history, any single price figure for Niehaus should be treated as indicative rather than definitive.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Niehaus, and no gallery or estate currently represents him in a formal sense; his paintings circulate through Dutch dealers such as Simonis & Buunk and Metzemaekers and through general auction platforms. Attribution and cataloguing rely on the RKD, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, and on the auction houses and dealers who have handled individual works. Buyers should note that auction catalogues use both "Kasper Niehaus" and "Kaspar Niehaus" for the same artist, which matters for provenance and title searches. Given the small number of well documented sales and the gaps in the public record around his single highest reported result, collectors should treat any headline price figure for this artist with caution and verify it against the underlying sale.