Jacoba van Heemskerck

By 1913 she had given up recognisable places for pure colour and line, and the people who understood what she was doing were almost all in Berlin. Jacoba van Heemskerck, a Dutch painter, found her real audience across the border in Germany.

Her first lessons came from her father, a Dutch naval officer who painted seascapes on the side, and she trained at the Royal Academy in The Hague and briefly in Paris. Then she discovered Der Sturm, the Berlin avant-garde magazine and gallery run by Herwarth Walden, a tireless promoter of new art. From 1913 she was one of his most frequently shown artists, tied to him by a correspondence that lasted the rest of her life. Her bold abstract landscapes sold in Germany while the Dutch public largely looked past them.

After 1916 she took up stained glass, turning her strong colour into leaded windows for naval barracks and a public health building in Amsterdam. She spent her last year in the seaside town of Domburg with her longtime patron and friend Marie Tak van Poortvliet, and died there in 1923, at 47.