Albert Houthuesen was born in 1903 in Amsterdam, moving to London with his mother and siblings in 1912, following the sudden death of his artist father. Houthuesen studied at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art, afterwards earning a living through part-time teaching at the Working Men's College. Despite creating art throughout the 1930s–50s, and the Tate Gallery acquiring a number of his paintings in the late 1930s, Houthuesen became recognised only later in his life, following a solo exhibition at Reid Gallery in London in 1961.
Albert Houthuesen was born Albertus Antonius Johannes Houthuesen in 1903 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Jean Charles Pierre Houthuesen, a painter and pianist, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Wedemeyer). In 1912, he moved to Britain with his mother and siblings, settling in Hampstead, following the sudden death of his father, who three weeks prior was attacked by his mother, frustrated by his giving up reliable work in the piano-making business in favour of art and by his praising his son's artistic attempts; his death would haunt his son for the rest of his life. Poor and unable to speak English, he undertook various jobs, including as a furniture maker and in an architect's office, while attending evening classes at St Martin's School of Art. Houthuesen was naturalised in 1922 and, in 1923, after three rejected scholarship applications to the Royal College of Art (RCA), he was finally accepted, after his works were shown to the school's director, William Rothenstein. Thus began a lifelong friendship with the Rothenstein family, particularly with Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery from 1938-64, who became a keen supporter of Houthuesen's work (their correspondence is held in the Tate Archive). Houthuesen attended the RCA from 1923-27, where his peers included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Edward Burra, Ceri Richards and Cecil Collins. and where he also met his future wife, painter Catherine Dean (1905–1983).
In the 1930s Houthuesen received few commissions, despite his painting Stack Yard being acquired by the Tate in 1939, and he earned a living mostly through part-time teaching at The Working Men's College (1928–36). Throughout the 1930s, for three months each year Houthuesen and his wife would stay at her aunt's house in Trelogan, a small mining village in north Wales near the coast: 'Cath and I would climb to various highpoints and look around this huge landscape. It was a rough, make-do landscape and everything was very natural' (artist's quote from the 1976 BBC documentary). It was during these visits that Houthuesen made portraits of local colliers that are among his best works (including Jo Parry, Welsh Collier (1935), National Museum Wales). During this time Houthuesen also produced his first expressionistic seascapes, inspired by his time in Wales, as well as by subsequent visits to Sussex and Devon.
In the mid-1930s, Houthuesen suffered from a duodenal ulcer, which prevented him from joining up, following the outbreak of the Second World War. His application to become an official War Artist was also rejected, and he was eventually hired as a tracer in the technical drawing office of the London and North Eastern Railway Company in Doncaster, Yorkshire. The combination of this unfulfilling job, together with the destruction of the majority of his works that he had left with a neighbour in London in his absence, led to a nervous breakdown. Houthuesen returned to London at the end of the war and met a family of Russian clowns who inspired him to work on a series of studies of clowns, a theme he continued to explore until his death. In 1952 he settled permanently with his wife at 5 Love Walk, Camberwell. It was not until 1961 that Houthuesen's work gained wider recognition, when the first solo exhibition was held at the Reid Gallery, London, followed by five shows at the Mercury Gallery (1967–77) and other displays. A reviewer from the Illustrated London News described Houthuesen as a 'latter-day expressionist whose violent seascapes are as much pictures of a mental landscape as they are of a physical one' (Illustrated London News, 16 September 1967). Several of Houthuesen's exhibitions during the 1970s–80s were organised by art dealer, Richard Nathanson, who subsequently became his biographer and manager of his estate. A BBC documentary on Houthuesen's life and work was produced in 1976. In 1990 Nathanson published a biography of the artist entitled Walk to the Moon: The Story of Albert Houthuesen, 1903–1979. The title included the English translation of the Dutch expression 'Loop Naar de Maan' meaning 'Forget it', referring to how Houthuesen's mother would respond whenever, as a child, he asked her for painting materials. Houthuesen died in Camberwell, London, in 1979. His paintings are in UK collections including the Ashmolean Museum, British Museum, Tate and Victoria & Albert Museum.