He was born in
Hamme on 3 October 1884, to Hendrik and Clemence Van den Brande. Vertenten worked from 1910 to 1925 on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea among the
Marind-anim, a Papuan people living in the area of Maurake, who at the time were notorious for their
headhunting and peculiar sexually oriented rituals. The spread of an imported venereal disease, the
granuloma venereum, led this population - partly due to its own ritual practices - almost to extinction. Father Vertenten repeatedly alerted the Dutch government in
Merauke and eventually even got to speak to the
governor-general in
Batavia about this. As a result, a parliamentary debate was held in the Netherlands about the state of health in New Guinea. Vertenten succeeded and a squad of vaccinators and other medical personnel were deployed to save the Marind-anim from extinction. ,
Amsterdam From 1927 to 1939, Vertenten worked in the
Belgian Congo, His oil paintings and crayons of the Marind-anim men and women, whether or not in full ritual attire, are perhaps the first full-color representations of a Papuan culture. After his death, a large part of his oeuvre, as well as a meticulously maintained archive, were preserved in the mission house in
Borgerhout, where Vertenten's career had started. In 2001 this estate was taken over by the
Tropenmuseum in
Amsterdam, where a number of the paintings can be seen in the semi-permanent exhibition. The archive was moved to the Catholic Documentation Center (
Katholiek Documentatie Centrum) of
Radboud University Nijmegen. ==References==