Decorative original advertisement poster of the famous Bali Hotel in Denpasar. This is an original lithographed poster, signed and dated (1948) in the stone by the famous Willem Hofker (1902-1981). Much sought after by collectors, this poster is very suitable for framing.
The Bali Hotel in Denpasar Bali,
The first step of organized tourism in Balinese history was made in 1924 when the Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij (KPM) established a weekly steamship route between Bali and Batavia (Jakarta), Singapore, Semarang, Surabaya and Makassar. The first tourists were from the Dutch colonial administration. The schedule was that the passengers disembarked on a Friday morning, made a round trip on the island by car, and left on Sunday. They slept on the ship or in rest houses. Four years later, in 1928, the first international hotel in Bali was opened by the Dutch shipping company KPM: the Bali Hotel in downtown Denpasar, built on the site of the 1906 Badung Puputan. Today the hotel still exists, holding a different name: Inna Bali Hotel.
Willem G. Hofker,
Hofker, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, carried out a number of monumental decorative assignments during the 1920s, amongst others for the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Stoomvaart Maatschappij (KNSM) for whom he made a few mural paintings on ships. His reputation as a portrait painter was such that he received the assignment in 1936 to paint a portrait of Queen Wilhemina for the head office of the Koninklijke Pakketvaart Maatschappi (KPM), the Royal Packet Navigation Company in Batavia. In 1938 the couple accompanied the painting to the Dutch East Indies and concluded with a trip through the archipelago, ending up in Bali. During this trip they made drawings and paintings of Indonesian subjects that could be reproduced and used by the KPM. The Hofkers socialized with many painters, including Spies, Strasser, Meyer and their good friend Rudolf Bonnet. In 1940 the couple moved to Ubud and today, many of his paintings are exhibited in the ARMA and the Neka Museum in Ubud.
