The flamboyant Nola Hatterman was born into a privileged Amsterdam family in 1899. Her father worked for a company importing goods from the Dutch East Indies. When in the 1930s immigrants from the colonies entered society, they became fashionable painter’s models. Nola would never look back: through her art, she propagated a black beauty ideal, while fighting racism and supporting young Surinamese students in Amsterdam, sharing their commitment to independence.

An early feminist, Hatterman started out as an actress with a strong conviction that women were equal to men on stage. Between rehearsals, she took private drawing lessons from Vittorio Schiavon and Charles Haak and exhibited her first drawing at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1919. In 1920, Nola met her future husband Maurits de Vries, director of a play she was in. Three years later, they moved in together, certainly unconventional at the time. With fourteen years difference in age, Nola married De Vries in 1931, although their marriage would end in divorce by 1940.

Hatterman’s strong feminist views shaped her response to the subordination of women. In this subjugated position she felt kinship with other oppressed groups: laborers, Jews, immigrants, and especially the colonized. Only recently has her role as an important Dutch artist been reclaimed. Her move to Surinam in 1953 contributed to Hatterman being an overlooked rare female participant of the New Objectivity movement. Her 1930 portrait of trumpetist Lou Richard Drenthe in On the Terrace was recently included in The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, recognizing Hatterman as a champion of dignified black portraiture.