Henry van de Velde
Belgian architect, 1863-1957
Henry Clemens Van de Velde was a Belgian painter, architect, interior designer, and art theorist. Together with Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, he is considered one of the founders of Art Nouveau in Belgium. He worked in Paris with Samuel Bing, the founder of the first gallery of Art Nouveau in Paris. Van de Velde spent the most important part of his career in Germany and became a major figure in the German Jugendstil. Van de Velde was strongly influenced by John Ruskin and William Morris’s English Arts and Crafts movement and he was one of the first architects or furniture designers to apply curved lines in an abstract style, rather than based on nature.
Source: Wikipedia