Jan Sluijters (1881-1957)

born Hertogenbosch, 17 Dec 1881; d Amsterdam, 8 May 1957). Dutch painter and draughtsman. His first artistic training was in ’s Hertogenbosch (1893–4), where his father Gijsbertus Antonius Sluijters (1847–1927) was a wood-engraver. In 1894 his family moved to Amsterdam, the city where Jan Sluijters was to spend the rest of his life. After taking his art teacher’s certificate (1900) he went to the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten. In 1904 he won the Prix de Rome. Visiting Paris in 1906, however, he became fascinated by modern art. Sluijters’s confrontation with the work of Neo-Impressionists, Fauvists and such painters as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Kees van Dongen resulted in sensational and dynamically modern work and made him a pioneer of modernism in the Netherlands. He assimilated the French influences into a divisionist style, characterized by an expressive use of bright dots, lines and blocks of colour corresponding to the artist’s personal view of the motif. The application of this technique, particularly in landscape paintings such as October Sun, Laren (1910; Haarlem, Frans Halsmus.), shows how strongly he admired the later work of Vincent van Gogh. It was this form of divisionism, of which the chief representatives were Sluijters, Piet Mondrian and Leo Gestel, that brought about the breakthrough for Amsterdam’s avant-garde painters in 1909 and that paved the way generally for the development of modern art in the Netherlands. The new French colour was used in even more concentrated form in a number of figure paintings from 1911, made up of larger planes with clearly defined outlines, for example Woman Reading (Eindhoven, Van Abbemus.).