Reimond Kimpe

Reimond Kimpe (also documented as Raymundus Josephus Petrus Kimpe and Reimond Jozef Peter Kimpe) was born in 1885, most sources say in Ghent, Belgium, though one source gives Delft; the day of birth is also inconsistently reported, with 8 December and 6 December both appearing in reference sources. He studied civil engineering at Ghent University; no record of formal art-school training has been found, and he appears to have turned to painting seriously only around age 40, after an engineering career.

After the First World War he relocated to Middelburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland, where he spent the rest of his working life. His early paintings focused on ships, harbors, and the Zeeland coast; after 1929 his work turned toward the human figure and the relationships between people, and he also produced stained glass.

Kimpe died in 1970. One source gives the date as 11 May 1970 in Goes, Netherlands, while another places his death in Veere; a precise, independently confirmed date and location could not be established from the sources consulted.

No exact, attributable critic quotations about Kimpe's work in major outlets could be confirmed. What is documented is institutional: his paintings are held by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, confirmed directly through the museum's own online collection record, and are also cited, through a single dealer source, as present in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Kroller-Muller Museum, Museum De Lakenhal, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. That spread of Belgian and Dutch institutions is the strongest available evidence of his standing, in the absence of surviving critical commentary that can be quoted with confidence.

Kimpe's auction market is thin and inconsistently documented. The highest publicly identified result is USD 63,500 for a work titled The Family, sold at Christie's on 3 October 2024, according to a secondary auction-data aggregator; the sale location and further lot details could not be independently confirmed. A separate Christie's result of roughly EUR 40,320 for an unidentified work is also documented, though its exact sale date could not be confirmed from any source consulted. Outside these two results, listings and past-sale archives on platforms such as Invaluable, MutualArt, Artnet, and regional houses like Harrington's generally show Kimpe estimates and results in the low thousands of dollars or euros, well below both figures above.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Kimpe, and no gallery or estate holds exclusive representation; his work currently moves through independent dealers, including Simonis & Buunk in the Netherlands and Papillon Gallery in Los Angeles, and through auction houses. Given the thin and only partly verified auction record, the wide estimate ranges seen at sale, and discrepancies across reference sources on his exact birth and death dates and places, collectors should verify any specific work against dealer, auction-house, and museum provenance records rather than relying on a single online listing.