Ferdinand Erfmann

Ferdinand Erfmann was a Dutch painter, draftsman, stage actor and acrobat. These professions merged in his paintings of the stage and circus worlds. His main subjects, however, were women, as burly bathers, factory girls, athletes and prostitutes, or men as transvestites in a flat, schematic figurative style in the 1920s influenced by New Objectivism.

In the 1930s, Erfmann, inspired by his travels to the Mediterranean, painted mainly Neoclassical landscapes and mythical figures. He attended several art schools and academies in Amsterdam, but all of them just for less than a year: the arts and crafts school Quellinus (1917-1918), the Institute for Artistic and Crafts Training and the Institute for the Training of Drawing Teachers (1927), and finally the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts, 1927-1928). Erfmann then lived and worked in Amsterdam until his death by drowning in the sea off Sardegna.

His oil painting Handball Players or simply Handball was painted in 1940, although some sources give a date in the 1950s.