Sarphatipark in De Pijp, Amsterdam, Nederland

Sarphatipark — Where Mondriaan's Journey Began

A Park with a Long Memory

Sarphatipark holds more history than its quiet paths suggest.

Construction began in 1881, and the park opened in 1886, designed in a free English landscape style by city engineer J.G. van Niftrik. It carries the name of Samuel Sarphati, a Jewish physician who died in 1866, chosen by residents through a petition a few years after his death. During the Second World War, the Nazi occupation renamed it “Bollandpark,” erasing Sarphati’s Jewish name from the map. Liberation restored it in 1945, and a 2004 renovation reshaped the park’s ponds and paths into what visitors walk today.

Sarphatipark in De Pijp, Amsterdam

Mondriaan’s Years Here

From 1908 to 1911, the painter Piet Mondriaan lived and worked in an atelier at Sarphatipark 42, right at the park’s edge.

His work at the time still belonged to a traditional, naturalistic style, closer to the Hague School than to anything abstract. The bold language he later became known for, flat planes of red, yellow, and blue, arranged in strict horizontal and vertical lines, only emerged after he left Amsterdam for Paris. There, through the 1910s, his painting moved steadily from landscapes toward pure abstraction.

That evolution fed directly into a new movement. In 1917, the painter and writer Theo van Doesburg founded De Stijl in Leiden, with Mondriaan among its founding members. The architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld joined soon after, translating the same principles into furniture and buildings, most famously his Red and Blue Chair and the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht.

De Stijl did not stand alone. Across Europe, the devastation of the First World War pushed artists toward radical new directions. Dada emerged in Zurich in 1916, mocking the logic that had led to war. Bauhaus followed in Weimar in 1919, merging art, craft, and design under one roof. Each movement searched, in its own way, for order or meaning after a world that had lost both.

RYB Global Development and Culture of Peace NL work from De Pijp, just steps from this same park, where Mondriaan’s early Amsterdam years once began.

A Spiritual Search Behind the Art

Mondriaan’s turn toward abstraction was never only a formal experiment. It grew out of a spiritual search too.

In 1908, he attended lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave in Amsterdam for the Dutch Theosophical Society, a movement built on the writings of Helena Blavatsky. A year later, Mondriaan joined the society himself. At the time, this counted as a genuinely radical step. The Netherlands still leaned heavily on Protestant orthodoxy, and theosophy’s search for a hidden unity behind all religions and philosophies stood well outside the mainstream.

Mondriaan was far from alone. An earlier circle, the Vāhana Lodge, had formed in Amsterdam in 1896, drawing in architects and artists who tried to apply theosophical ideas directly to their work. Historians trace some of the intellectual roots of De Stijl back to that same milieu, decades before van Doesburg gave the movement its name. Beyond Blavatsky’s own writings, Mondriaan is known to have read the French author Édouard Schuré and Rudolf Steiner directly, feeding the same spiritual search that shaped his later work.

Steiner’s own path adds another layer. He had been a leading figure within the Theosophical Society before breaking away around 1912 to found Anthroposophy as a distinct movement, built on many of Blavatsky’s ideas but developed in his own direction.

One local building ties this history directly to today’s De Pijp. In 1927, architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt built a meeting hall for the Theosophical Society on the Tolstraat, at what is now number 160. Over the following decades, the same building served as a synagogue, then a cinema known as CinéTol, later a public library still remembered locally as the “Cinetol Library,” and today as Tempel Amsterdam, home to the contemporary art center De Appel since 2024. A hall built for spiritual searching now hosts contemporary art instead, just a few streets from where that search once began.

Visit our Cultural Centers page for more on Tempel Amsterdam, De Appel, Cinetol, and the wider history of theosophy in this neighbourhood.

Sarphatipark in De Pijp, Amsterdam

The Doctor Behind the Park

Samuel Sarphati, born in 1813, was both a physician and an urban planner, at a time when Amsterdam badly needed both.

He saw a city choking on overcrowding and poor sanitation, and set out to change it. In 1855, he opened a bread factory selling loaves thirty percent cheaper than the average city baker, a small business decision with an outsized effect: by 1870, life expectancy in Amsterdam had risen noticeably. Beyond bread, Sarphati founded hospitals, schools, and public health institutions, and pushed for the new neighbourhoods and parks a growing city needed.

This park carries his name for good reason. It remains one of his most visible legacies, a green retreat in a district he helped shape from the ground up.

Sarphati’s Name Lives On

The physician’s legacy did not end with the park. In 2018, researchers founded Sarphati Amsterdam, a scientific institute studying healthy living in the city, bringing together the GGD Amsterdam and several of the city’s universities and hospitals.

A Park Still Growing

Sarphatipark keeps changing with the city around it. A nature play forest now lets children aged six to fourteen play among the greenery, designed by De Twee Heren with input from children living in De Pijp itself.

Sources and Links