Ootje Oxenaar, designer of the leather guilder banknote, has died (87 years old).

Robert Deodat-Emile “Otje” Auxenaar is no longer around. The 87-year-old designer died in his hometown near Boston in the United States. Oxenaar designed the banknotes of De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) from 1966 to 1986. Additionally, from 1975 until his retirement in 1994, he was head of the Department of Aesthetic Design (DEV) of the state postal service PTT, known today as PostNL.

For DNB, he designed the famous image-free banknote series of 50 (sunflower), 100 (snipe) and 250 guilders (lighthouse). He also made an earlier series of guilders with portraits of historical figures such as Joost van den Vondel (five guilders) and Baruch Spinoza (one thousand guilders).

Oxenaar's series of photographs were fairly conventional.

Bright colors and jokes

Auxenaar was a firm believer in using bright colors on banknotes and made it a motif in his designs.

He liked the joke: among other things, he hid his thumbprint on Frans Hals's ten-guilder note and placed the image of his girlfriend's rabbit as a watermark on the famous lighthouse paper.

Oksenaar became really famous for his brightly colored banknotes of 50, 100 and 250 guilders..

In 2000, six years after resigning from his duties at PTT, he moved to the United States to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design. He visited Holland regularly, but never returned.

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