Jacoba van Heemskerck

Biography Jacoba van Heemskerck

Jonkvrouw Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest had been surrounded by art since childhood. Her father Jacob van Heemskerck van Beest had become a successful marine painter after ending his career as a naval officer. After Jacoba had learned the basics of painting at home, she took several courses and classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague (c. 1891-1900). She did not feel very much at ease under the conservative and anti-modern climate prevailing at the school. After finishing her education in 1900, she went to work one day a week at the studio of Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig in Laren where many progressive artists came together and an artists’ colony developed. Hart Nibbrig was an innovative painter who was not inspired by the realist approach of the established Hague School but by contemporary stylistic innovations from France, Neo-Impressionism in particular. 1901 marks an important moment in Van Heemskerck’s life as her mother died leaving her unmarried and independent. She moved from The Hague to Hilversum and made the brave decision to pursue a career as a professional artist. Furthermore she decided that it would be best for her development to work in Paris, the epic center of the avant-garde.

PARIS 1901-1904

In the French capital, Van Heemskerck worked at the Academie Carrière for about six months. It was a private training institute run by symbolist painter Eugène Carrière. The Dutch Symbolist artist Jan Toorop had probably introduced Van Heemskerck to Carrière in Paris. The Academie was an deliberate and telling choice by Van Heemskerck as the institute was known for stimulating students to develop their own style. This attracted many innovative young artists such as Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch and Henri Matisse. Van Heemskerck was influenced by Carrière’s philosophy and style. The continuous flowing line as an independent means of expression with which Carrière composed his paintings, as well as his belief that light transmits the essence of a picture resonate in her work. Carrière’s intentions of visualizing the personality of his sitters rather than their facial features as realistically as possible inspired her. From 1901-1904 Van Heemskerck lived and worked alternately in Paris and Hilversum. She exhibited work at the exhibition organized by the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs at the Grand Palais in 1904. Probably because of her asthmatic condition, the smoke pollution in the French capital did not allow for a longer stay in Paris. She returned, seriously ill, to Hilversum in 1904.

RETURNING TO THE HAGUE – MARIE TAK VAN POORTVLIET 1905

Marie Tak van Poortvliet was Van Heemskerck’s life partner and patron. The wealthy Tak van Poortvliet family originally came from the province of Zeeland where they owned several estates. In 1904 Marie’s father died and she inherited a very large fortune. She sold her childhood home where she had previously lived with her father and bought a house for herself in The Hague. This prompted Van Heemskerck to move to a house around the corner of Tak van Poortvliet in 1905. In the summer of that year, while staying in Domburg, Zeeland, Tak van Poortvliet bought a plot of land and commissioned a cottage. Over the years and together with Van Heemskerck, Tak van Poortvliet built one of the most interesting collections of modern art in the Netherlands. This collection of contemporary art consisted of important works by Van Heemskerck, Kandinsky, Marc, Mondrian, and others. After Van Heemskerck’s death, Tak van Poortvliet managed the artist’s estate which was for the most part given to the Kunstmuseum in The Hague where it remains until today.

RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY

Central to Van Heemskerck’s work is the depiction of spiritual values as embodied in nature and life. From an early age, Van Heemskerck was a religious and spiritual person. The traditional Christian Church did not offer her the framework and fulfillment she was looking for. The Theosophical Society suited her much better. In 1910, Van Heemskerck joined this society which was popular among avant-garde artists. Befriended artists such as Hart Nibbrig and Piet Mondrian were also members. The association’s three central goals: universal brotherhood, study of religion, philosophy and science, and investigation of the inexplicable laws of nature, greatly appealed to her. It was believed that by studying the eternal esoteric wisdoms, man would once again find his own spiritual origin.

In the following years Van Heemskerck became interested in Rudolf Steiner and his spiritual philosophy and occult science: anthroposophy. Her engagement with Steiner’s theories had a profound influence on her art. The Austrian Steiner connected modern art with spiritual science. His conception of color combined Goethe’s color theory with anthroposophy. Goethe’s approach was more about the psychological and emotional effects of color, whereas Steiner’s system linked color to spiritual to spiritual and personal growth.

THE START OF VAN HEEMSKERCK’S CAREER 1905-1913

SINT LUCAS ARTISTS’ ASSOCIATION

Between 1905 and 1913, Van Heemskerck was part of a group of young progressive Dutch artists including Jan Sluiters, Leo Gestel, Piet Mondrian, Conrad Kickert, Lodewijk Schelfhout and others. They were inspired by the latest stylistic developments in France instead of by work by the successful artists from the Hague School. Most of them, like van Heemskerck, were members of the Sint Lucas artists’ association in Amsterdam. Sint Lucas only had very few female members. The reason for this was that not many women chose to become professional artists. Furthermore, a significant number of those few female artists did not want to make modern art but preferred to produce works in the established genres and styles as these were in demand by the larger public.

MONDRIAN

Part of Van Heemskerck’s fame today is due to her connection with Mondrian, one of the world’s most famous twentieth-century artists. The two were friends and over a short period of time their work showed stylistic similarities. They both experimented in roughly simultaneous periods with Symbolism, Luminism and Cubism. The artists belonged to the same generation and they both had successful careers abroad. The majority of the Dutch conservative audience considered their work too modern and too radical. Therefore, the importance of their endeavors was first acknowledged in countries less conservative in taste. Theosophy and anthropology provided both with intellectual inspiration for their work. In recent years, Van Heemskerck has stepped out of Mondrian’s shadow. Perceptions about her work are changing and her oeuvre is considered in its own right. There is a growing appreciation for the fact that Van Heemskerck consciously turned away from Mondrian around 1913 and focused on a style all her own.

DOMBURG

The Zeeland coastal town Domburg, characterized by its picturesque surroundings and special light, developed as an artists’ colony for the Dutch avant-garde during the summer months at the dawn of the twentieth century. Toorop, around 1900 the most successful and internationally acclaimed living artist in the Netherlands, played an important role in this. From 1897 he spent his summers in Domburg. His presence attracted befriended, like-minded avant-garde artists in the following years. From 1911 to 1921, summer exhibitions were organized in a small, purpose-built pavilion on the beach (fig. 1).

Van Heemskerck and her partner Tak van Poortvliet also played an important role within Domburg’s cultural community. They stayed in the coastal town during the summers from 1906 until the end of their lives. Van Heemskerck was one of the few artists with a house in the fashionable seaside resort. Villa Loverdale, the house that Tak van Poortvliet had commissioned, was completed in the summer of 1908. Three years later a studio for Van Heemskerck was added in the garden. Over the years many Dutch and international friends including artists, theosophists and anthroposophists, writers, art dealers, musicians, doctors, psychiatrists came to visit or stayed as guests at Villa Loverdale.

Fig. 1 Artists in front of the exhibition pavilion on the beach in Domburg in 1911. Van Heemskerck and Tak van Poortvliet are wearing a hat and tie, Van Heemskerk is standing in the door post. Jan Toorop, Annie Hall, Charlie Toorop, Jan Heyse and Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig can also be identified.

Van Heemskerck and her partner Tak van Poortvliet also played an important role within Domburg’s cultural community. They stayed in the coastal town during the summers from 1906 until the end of their lives. Van Heemskerck was one of the few artists with a house in the fashionable seaside resort. Villa Loverdale, the house that Tak van Poortvliet had commissioned, was completed in the summer of 1908. Three years later a studio for Van Heemskerck was added in the garden. Over the years many Dutch and international friends including artists, theosophists and anthroposophists, writers, art dealers, musicians, doctors, psychiatrists came to visit or stayed as guests at Villa Loverdale.

Mondrian was their guest during the summer of 1908. During that summer in Domburg, Mondrian had a stylistic breakthrough which helped him abandon realism. In Villa Loverdale’s garden he made preparatory sketches of a tree which formed the artistic basis for his famous painting Evening Red Tree (fig. 2), which was acquired by Tak van Poortvliet. The work is painted in an innovative style later described as Luminism, a Dutch Neo-Impressionist art movement. Luminist painters sought to depict the non-visible in nature. Their use of color was indebted to the Fauves, the Neo-Impressionist works by Jan Toorop and Vincent van Gogh. The latter had a major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1905. Van Heemskerck also experimented with Luminism at the time (fig. 3).

Fig. 2 Piet Mondrian, Evening: Red Tree, 1908-10, oil on canvas, 70 x 99 cm, Kunstmuseum The Hague, inv.no.0332041 and fig. 3 Jacoba van Heemskerkerck, Two Trees, 1910, oil on canvas, 70 x 88 cm. Kunstmuseum The Hague, inv.no 0335092.

MODERN ART CIRCLE [MODERNE KUNSTKRING] 

The Dutch artists’ association Moderne Kunstkring was founded by Conrad Kickert and Jan Sluiters while working in Paris in 1910. Inspired by the art scene in the French capital they wanted to promote avant-garde art in the Netherlands. With exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam they showcased the latest international and national trends in 1911, 1912 and 1913. In many cases it was the first time important foreign works were presented in the Netherlands. Works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Van Heemskerck, Mondrian, Paul Cézanne, Lodewijk Schelfhout, Toorop, Paul Gauguin, Franz Marc, Kees van Dongen, Henri le Faucconier, Wassily Kandinsky and many others caused a shockwave among the conservative Dutch audience.

Only four female artists were allowed to participate at the exhibitions of the Moderne Kunstkring. Van Heemskerck, Else Berg, Charley Toorop and Marie Laurencin. Only Van Heemskerck was represented at all three exhibitions. It emphasizes her exceptional and prominent position as a woman artist in the Netherlands at the time. In 1913 she exhibited Composition [Haventje met gemeerde botters] (see artworks for sale).

CUBISM

Cubist works were at the center of attention at the exhibition of the Moderne Kunstkring in 1912, after having been presented for the first time to a wider audience at the Salon des Indepéndants in Paris only one year before. The art historical importance of Cubism can hardly be overestimated within stylistic and conceptual developments in the twentieth century. It formed the basis of a completely new approach to art. Cubism provided artists with the opportunity to create a radical, new visual language that was based on the expression of personal perceptions and the essence of things instead of their physical appearance. For many artists, like Van Heemskerck, engaging with Cubism was a catalyst leading them towards the discovery of their artistic identity. Van Heemskerck experimented with Cubism in 1912 and 1913. Most notably the presence of geometric shapes, the absence of perspective and a muted color palette helped her to further develop her ideas. In Composition she drew on these elements to create a new authentic style moving beyond cubism. The artist emphasized contours by applying bold black outlines which would become typical for Van Heemskerck’s later work.

PIVOTAL YEAR 1913

In 1913 several important developments formed the foundation of the artist’s successful international career. Van Heemskerck’s artistic exchange with Mondrian diminished and she consciously began to paint work which was less oriented towards Cubism and abstraction. Van Heemskerck began to concentrate increasingly on form, line and color in her work. Furthermore, it was around this time that she started to give her work abstract titles.

The influential art dealer, writer, composer, musician and publisher Herwarth Walden organized the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Fall Salon) in Berlin at the end of 1913. The German painters Franz Marc and August Macke where in charge of this legendary exhibition. Van Heemskerck had been invited to exhibited four paintings at the show. Her work hung between the German avant-garde’s most progressive works. She and Tak van Poortvliet traveled to Berlin to visit the show. This trip marked a turning point in her career. The exhibition made an overwhelming impression on Van Heemskerck and increased her interest in German art, making her less receptive to developments in France. In Berlin, Van Heemskerck met Walden and his wife Nell in person for the first time.

HERWARTH WALDEN

A long and defining friendship developed between Van Heemskerck and Walden and the latter had a major influence on the artist’s career. Walden was the first influential and international art dealer to see the potential of Van Heemskerck and her work. His acknowledgement and appreciation encouraged the artist to focus on depicting her inner world. Walden presented Van Heemskerck’s work to a wide international audience through his exhibitions and his magazine Der Sturm. Only a few months after their first meeting in Berlin, Walden showed no less than twenty-one works by Van Heemskerck at the twenty-third Der Sturm exhibition in Berlin in 1914, thereby launching her career in Germany. The other artists represented at this exhibition were Arthur Segal, Marianne von Werefkin, Franz Marc, Vincent van Gogh, Oskar Kokoschka, Alexander Archipenko and Jacob Epstein.

Van Heemskerck decided to give Walden the exclusive right to exhibit and sell her work. This exclusive right lasted from circa 1914 to 1920. She was the only Dutch artist represented by Galerie Der Sturm. Walden’s great esteem for her art translated into ten solo exhibitions. Galerie Der Sturm represented the best German avant-garde artists, yet none of them had their works featured on the front cover of Der Sturm magazine more often (twenty times) than Van Heemskerk.

KANDINSKY

Among other exceptional artists Walden also promoted Wassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of modern art and co-founder of the expressionist Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group in Germany. Van Heemskerck was aware of Kandinsky whose work was also exhibited in the Netherlands on several occasions. Both artists were influenced by and in direct contact with Rudolf Steiner.

In his publication Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) from 1911 Kandinsky theorized that art has the potential to affect the soul and promote spiritual awakening through the use of color, form, and abstraction. He argued that the artist must be attuned to the inner, spiritual dimension of life and that abstraction is a means for expressing these deeper truths. This inspired Van Heemskerck and their work started to show stylistic similarities. Not entirely surprisingly, as they shared similar visions on art and spirituality, Kandinsky commented positively on Van Heemskerck’s work in letters to Walden.

 

SAILBOATS

Sailboats were never far away in the coastal towns of The Hague and Domburg where the artist, the daughter of a former Marine and naval painter, lived and worked. The boats have a significant role as a motif within her oeuvre. The vessels have geometric forms of their own and were therefore as a motif perfectly suited for abstraction. Sailboats, man-built means of transportation that connect three of the four elements, in many cases have an underlying symbolic meaning in her work. For Van Heemskerck they symbolized man’s inner spiritual journey in search of spiritual perfection beyond material matters.

Fig. 4 A presentation of woodcuts at Kunstmuseum in The Hague, 2024.

WOODCUTS

Already early on in her career Van Heemskerck made prints. Initially her interest was in lithography as a printing technique. She began actively producing prints, mainly woodcuts, in 1914. A total of about forty-five compositions are known. The color transparency she pursued in her paintings is also evident in her woodcuts. She applied paint sparingly to her woodblocks. Interestingly, by integrating the partly visible paper support in her prints Van Heemskerck followed Carrière’s example, whose work she had studied during her time at the Academie Carrière years before.

Her interest in woodcuts coincides with a trend among German avant-garde artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. They revived the printing technique that had caused a furore in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Most of Van Heemskerck’s woodcuts are printed with black ink. Some of them were later hand-colored with watercolor but very few are printed in color.

Van Heemskerck’s signature style characterized by broad dark lines perfectly fits the medium woodcut. It seems to me as if the artist was encouraged by this medium to simplify her compositions, a direction that lead her to a strong authentic style.

STAINED-GLASS WINDOWS

Some progressive architects strove towards an innovative utopian architecture after the end of World War I. Glass and steel were the primary materials. Van Heemskerck began making designs for stained-glass windows in 1919. She purchased a small kiln to experiment with this technique herself. 

Stained-glass windows are a fascinating medium within Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre. It offered her unique opportunities to make color actually transparent. It allowed the visualization of the revelation of an immaterial spiritual world, which she had always sought to express in her paintings. In retrospect it can be said that this group of works best summarize her intentions and ideas on art and the spiritual world.

Watercolor, a transparent medium, suited her best for her window designs. The medium provided her a good indication of the color effect the glass would finally achieve. Glasfensterenwurf no. 22 is part of the first group of her design drawings made in 1919. Van Heemskerck convinced Walden to exhibit this group of designs that very year but refused to sell them. She wanted to be involved in the production and selection of the glass for the windows. Van Heemskerck also wanted to know in which buildings the windows would be placed. The artist stressed to Walden that the black lines in her design drawings did not all represent lead, which would connect one piece of colored glass to the next, and that some of the lines would be painted on the glass.

Fig. 6 Jacoba van Heemskerck, stained-glass window, 166.5 x 68.5 cm, 1920, Kunstmuseum The Hague, inv.no. 1002708

Several architects and glass manufacturers in the Netherlands and Germany reacted extremely positive to Van Heemskerck’s designs. In 1921 the artist and Tak van Poortvliet made a trip to the Bauhaus in Weimar. In the same year her lithograph Composition I was included in Bauhaus Drucke : Neue Europäische Graphik : 3te Mappe Deutsche Künstler. Van Heemskerck’s stained-glass windows were included in private and public buildings in Munich, Domburg, Amsterdam, Haarlem among other places. 

EARLY DEATH 1923 

All her life, Van Heemskerck suffered from a weak condition. In 1922 she contracted a the flu and died on August 3, 1923. Her doctor concluded that Angina caused her death. With her death disappeared a talented and brave Dutch artist. Her death was commemorated in several countries. She was honored with several exhibitions in 1924. Walden organized an in memorian exhibition in Berlin, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Kunstsalon Würthle in Vienna.

More information on Van Heemskerck can be found:

Wikipedia

Kunstmuseum The Hague

National Gallery Washington