Jan Vijlbrief

Jan Vijlbrief left only a few years of work behind him. Born in Leiden in 1868, he showed enough promise as a teenager to win prizes for his drawing, then studied at the art academy in The Hague.

The turning point was almost certainly an exhibition. In 1892 the painter Jan Toorop brought the Belgian avant-garde group Les Vingt to The Hague, and the bright, dotted canvases of the neo-impressionists seem to have reached Vijlbrief directly. By 1894 he was painting landscapes and still lifes in a divisionist style of his own, setting unusual colours side by side in combinations few Dutch painters were trying.

He had almost no time to develop it. In 1895 Vijlbrief took his own life in Leiden, at the age of 27, and his small body of pointillist work is most of what survives of him.