Narduus, Leonardus

Born in Utrecht in 1868, his parents were antique dealer Marcus Salomon and Katarina Alida Berlein. He studied in Amsterdam at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Visited Spain, Italy, Senegal, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia. From 1894 until the beginning of the 20th century, he sold works of art in the United States, taking advantage of the interest there in the paintings of the Dutch Renaissance and the fact that American buyers were not very well versed in Dutch painting. In 1904, in Paris, married Helena Bourgeois, in marriage they had two daughters. In 1911, Leonardus Salomon officially changed his surname to “Nardus”, and since then it has sometimes been called “Leo Nardus”.

In 1912, Leo Nardus, under the pseudonym Salomonson, took part in the Olympic Games in Stockholm , where he won the bronze medal in the team championship in fencing as part of the Netherlands national team. Leo Nardus also loved chess and financially supported a number of chess players - in particular, David Yanovsky and Frank Marshall , which allowed them to play matches for the world title with Emanuel Lasker . There are portraits of Marshall and Lasker painted by Nardus.

After the outbreak of World War I, Leo Nardus returned to the Netherlands, and since 1915 he lived in Blaricum . In 1921, he divorced, and moved to a mansion in French Tunisia. His collection of works of art, in which there were works by Rebmrandt, Rubens, Hals and Velazquez, was not separated during the divorce, and remained in storage in the Netherlands at Arnold van Buren, as the climate of North Africa could be harmful to the paintings. In 1928, Nardus and Van Buren entered into an agreement on joint ownership of the paintings.

After the Netherlands was occupied by Germany in 1940, the Nardus collection was confiscated as Jewish property and auctioned off.

• Leo Nardus - Olympic statistics at Sports-Reference.com