Stokstraat 51

Toon was looking for a suitable home. He found it on Stokstraat. Nowadays a chic shopping street, it used to be the red-light district of Maastricht. Just before Toon and Rietje moved to Maastricht, the neighborhood had been thoroughly renovated. Toon set his sights on the building at number 51. Only: it had just been bought by an architect. Confident as Toon was, he knocked on the door and said, ‘I would like to buy it.’ In the past, he had managed to take home a Mercedes from the dealer's wife so that he didn't have to wait ten days for his new car. The architect initially turned him down, but Toon persisted. Not long after, the architect relented and sold the house to Toon and Rietje.

On the first floor, Toon set up his studio, where he began to paint portraits and Limburg landscapes. He did not sign the canvases because he made them not for sale but purely out of hobby. Later at auctions, it turned out that there was indeed a lot of demand for Toon’s works. For instance, a self-portrait in which he wears a paper hat was sold for 56,000 euros.

Toon's youngest son Gaby wrote an amusing anecdote in the photo book he published about his father regarding the time in Stokstraat. Michaël’s dog – Toon’s eldest son – had the peculiar habit of biting the last person in a group on the calf. Only Gaby was left alone. Therefore, Gaby’s friends always made him walk at the back when they visited the Hermans family.

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