There is a statement about the relation of artist and work. He resorts to Fine Arts to make his point. He visualizes the public in front of a painting, the artist standing behind, cleaning his finger nails. This is to show that work and artist are apart. When I married, I dropped my last name and adopted the name of my wife.
Nothing is known about the meaning.
There is a family of civil servants dating back to the 15th century, working as far as Russia and America, but his family does not belong to them. The Frisian people is quite peculiar. They did not have last names until Napoleon's time. The French then commanded everybody to adopt a last name. Maybe he was a servant of that family.