The Subjects Nola Hatterman Returned To Again and Again

Hatterman built a career on a narrow, deliberate range of motifs. Knowing what she painted most often explains why her work looks the way it does, and why it resists easy category.

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The short answer

Nola Hatterman painted people above all. Her most common subjects were portraits of Black sitters, often friends and acquaintances from the Surinamese community, followed by everyday street and café scenes in Paramaribo, where she lived from the early 1950s. Still lifes and landscapes appear, but the human figure dominates her output.

Portraits as the Core of Her Work

The straightest answer to what Nola Hatterman painted most often is the individual portrait. She worked in the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s, and her sitters were frequently Black men and women of the Surinamese community in Amsterdam. Her best known painting, Op de stoep van Café Royale from 1930, shows exactly this: a group portrait of young Surinamese men outside an Amsterdam café, painted with the directness of someone who knew them.

This was not incidental subject matter. Hatterman took the dignity of her sitters as the point of the picture. The poses are composed, the clothing is worn with care, and the gaze meets the viewer. In an era when Dutch visual culture largely depicted colonial subjects as types, she painted named individuals. That choice, repeated across decades, is the single most consistent feature of her work.

Surinam Street Life and Daily Scenes

Hatterman moved to Suriname in the early 1950s and stayed for most of the rest of her life. The shift changed her settings more than her interests. Portraits remained central, but they now sat inside scenes of ordinary Paramaribo life: streets, shopfronts, markets, people at work and at leisure. The city itself became a recurring subject.

These genre scenes share the portrait's temperament. Nothing is dramatized. A street is a street, a conversation is a conversation, and the interest lies in posture and social texture rather than spectacle. Readers weighing a reproduction should note that these compositions tend to carry a lot of mid-tone detail, which rewards a larger format; the sizing question is treated separately in choosing a print size for a living room.

Her recurring motifs

Individual portraits of Black sitters, often from her own circle
Group scenes set in cafés and on Amsterdam stoops
Street and market scenes of daily life in Paramaribo
Occasional still lifes and landscapes, always secondary to the figure

What Her Subjects Add Up To

Taken together, the motifs describe a painter with one sustained argument. Hatterman believed, in effect, that the people colonial art had rendered as background deserved the full treatment of portraiture: attention, likeness, poise. Her still lifes and landscapes exist, but they never carry the weight the figures do. Anyone expecting a painter of tropical scenery will find something different.

This matters for choosing an edition. A portrait reads differently in a room than a street scene does; the first holds a wall on its own, the second works as part of a group. The distinction between formats is covered in canvas versus framed poster differences, and print quality itself in judging print quality. Hatterman's subjects are few. That narrowness is the strength.

She did not paint Suriname as scenery. She painted the people who lived in it.

Subject	Where it appears	Character
Individual portraits	Throughout her career, both continents	Composed, frontal, dignified
Group café and stoop scenes	Amsterdam years, 1920s to 1940s	Social, relaxed, precisely observed
Paramaribo street and market scenes	Suriname years, from the early 1950s	Documentary in tone, undramatic
Still lifes and landscapes	Sporadic	Secondary to the human figure

Hatterman's subjects in rough order of prominence

Key takeaways

Portraits of Black sitters are the most common subjects in Hatterman's paintings.
Her best known work, Op de stoep van Café Royale of 1930, is a group portrait of young Surinamese men in Amsterdam.
After moving to Suriname in the early 1950s she added street and daily-life scenes of Paramaribo.
Still lifes and landscapes appear in her work but never displace the human figure.

Related questions

Was Nola Hatterman herself Surinamese?

No. She was Dutch, born in Amsterdam, and spent the first decades of her career there. She moved to Suriname in the early 1950s and lived there for most of her remaining life, which is why her subject matter spans both places. Her connection to Suriname came through her sitters and her long residence, not her own background.

Did Hatterman paint only Black subjects?

Her most recognized paintings center Black sitters, and that focus is central to her reputation. But her output also includes still lifes, landscapes and other figure work. The portrait practice for which she is known was a deliberate commitment rather than the whole of what she produced, and the balance shifted somewhat across her decades in Suriname.

Are her paintings realistic or stylized?

Broadly realistic. Hatterman trained in a figurative tradition and kept it, even as abstraction dominated the period. Her likenesses are recognizable and her scenes are legible, with the stylization limited to simplified forms and a certain sober palette. Readers used to modernist distortion will find her work closer to careful observation than to experiment.

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