Jan Adam Zandleven

For most of his working life Jan Adam Zandleven was not a painter at all. Born in 1868 into a family that made and sold paint in Koog aan de Zaan, north of Amsterdam, he worked for his father's firm until he was past 30, painting only on the side and against his father's wishes.

What changed things was praise from the right people. Around 1901 the veteran painters Jozef Israëls and Paul Gabriël admired his work, and the influential critic and advisor Henk Bremmer took him up, introducing him to Helene Kröller-Müller, the collector whose holdings became this museum. She became one of his patrons, which is how his quiet landscapes came to hang here.

He spent his later years near the Veluwe woodland, painting trees in a dense, dabbed technique of small thick dots of colour laid one against another. He died in Rhenen in 1923.