Jacoba van Heemskerck

Jacoba van Heemskerck studied at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague from 1897 to 1901. She subsequently worked for six months at Eugène Carrière's studio in Paris. Every year, Van Heemskerck visited Domburg, a seaside resort in the Dutch province Zeeland, where she met artists such as Jan Toorop and Piet Mondriaan. She was influenced by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and she moved increasingly in the direction of abstraction. Van Heemskerck's friend and benefactor Marie Tak van Poortvliet had a studio built for the artist in 1912 and she was one of the few in the Netherlands who purchased Van Heemskerck's work. Her work was better received in Germany, where Van Heemskerck participated, for example, in the Erster Deutscher Herbssalon which was held in 1913. In addition to paintings and prints, Van Heemskerck also produced a number of stained glass windows.