Early Life, Family and Training In the city of Maastricht, within the Netherlands, Henri Jonas entered the world on May 8, 1878. He was born into a household where the craft of color and surface was a daily reality, being the son of Fieneke Jungschlaeger and Charles Jonas, a man who earned his living as a house painter. In those early years, the young boy followed the path laid out by his father, taking up the tools of the house painter to master the practicalities of his trade. This early immersion in the physical application of pigment provided a grounded beginning to a life that would eve…