My wife’s uncle, Hansfried Defet, who has died aged 90, was the founder and driving force behind Da Vinci Künstlerpinselfabrik, the Nuremberg-based manufacturer of high-quality artists’ and cosmetic brushes, a third of which are sold in the UK. Hansfried also contributed to the contemporary art movement through his support for artists and as an art collector.
The elder of two children of Anna (nee Hagen) and Friedrich Defet, Hansfried was born into a family of brush-makers in the village of Markt Erlbach, north-east of Nuremberg; they moved into the city when Hansfried was still very young and in 1930 acquired a paintbrush business originally founded in 1890.
After service in the second world war, Hansfried returned home, but his father was lost, last heard of in Courland in present-day Latvia. Hansfried was still only 19, but his mother said: “It’s the factory for you now.” So he took over the family business in 1945, and by 1951 had successfully transformed it into the Da Vinci company.
In 1950, Hansfried married Marianne Rottner. It was Marianne’s early involvement with groups of young artists that led the couple to start a private gallery in 1965. The Defets supported and collected the work of artists such as Oskar Koller, Werner Knaupp, Horst Antes, Karl Prantl and Peter Angermann.
As brush-making expanded, manufacturing moved to new premises. These were also in Nuremberg, as Hansfried firmly rejected the idea of moving production to a low-wage location overseas.
At the new factory, natural-hair brushes continued to be made by hand while synthetic-hair brush-making became largely automated. Meanwhile the former factory was transformed into the home of the Marianne and Hansfried Defet Foundation, with a gallery and an atelier with studios for 17 artists.
In 1999, 2000 and 2004, the Defets donated much of their collection of contemporary art to the newly founded Neues Museum in Nuremberg. This included many large pieces that are on public display in a sculpture garden alongside the city wall.
Marianne died in 2008 and Hansfried established an artist in residence programme in her memory. In 2011, he donated artworks to the Dresden New Masters Gallery. He continued to work at the Da Vinci factory but took time late in each working day to play the piano in the atelier. Music had been his first love and he and Marianne always made an annual pilgrimage to the Salzburg music festival.
Hansfried celebrated his 90th birthday with a concert at the Salzburg Mozarteum, to which he invited family, friends and all the staff at the Da Vinci company. He also commemorated his birthday with the donation of a further 50 works from his collection to the Neues Museum.
Hansfried’s younger sister, Apollonia, died earlier this year. He is survived by two nieces, Maike and Barbara, and four nephews, Hubert, Stefan, Wolfgang and Johannes.
