Han Richters was born in 1915 as the second son of the Rotterdam painter Marius Richters. As a great admirer of Rodin, he almost immediately focused on sculpting, which brought him to Zadkine in Paris via the academies of Rotterdam and The Hague. His first assignment was to make a wood sculpture for the rich interior of the steamship Nieuw Amsterdam in 1937. Richters made small sculptures of stone and wood and monumental statues and reliefs of which the liberation monument in Wageningen and the statue at the Provincial Hospital in Santpoort are the best known. His daughter often served as a model.