Therese Schwartze Portrait Painting by Paul Meijering

About "Therese Schwartze Portrait Painting"

by Paul Meijering

About the artwork

Realistic acrylic painting by the Dutch fine artist Paul Meijering of Dutch portrait painter Thérèse Schwartze. The painting is 90 x 120 cm and part of a permanent collection.

Schwartze belonged to an artistic family. Her father Johann Georg Schwartze was a painter, her sister Georgine was a sculptor and her sister Clara Theresia's daughters Lizzy Ansingh and Thérèse Ansingh also became artists. She married the editor-in-chief of the Algemeen Handelsblad, Anton van Duyl, in 1906.

Thérèse was initially trained by father Schwartze, who also gave her her first commissions. As art academies were not yet open to girls, he sent her for expensive private lessons first to Franz von Lenbach in Munich and then to Jean-Jacques Henner in Paris. There, in 1889, she won the gold medal at the International Exhibition with an inventive Self-Portrait in oil.

She portrayed members of the Dutch royal family, among others. The fame this brought her led to more and more commissions. Several of her works are in the Rijksmuseum and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

On 22 July 1918, her husband Anton van Duyl died. For Schwartze, who had weak health herself and tried to hide it from everyone, the death of her husband was a blow she would not overcome. Grief and sorrow were her portion. In the process, her health deteriorated rapidly until she herself died of a sudden onset of illness on 23 December 1918.

In 1921, Amsterdam named both a square and a street after her, the Thérèse Schwartzeplein and the Thérèse Schwartzestraat. She was originally buried at Zorgvlied. Her grave and memorial were later moved to the Nieuwe Ooster cemetery in Amsterdam.