Jan Rijlaarsdam Painting DAC Collection

Jan Rijlaarsdam was born March 2nd, 1911 in Nieuwkoop, Holland. In 1924 his family moved to Hilversum where they started a dairy shop. While delivering orders by bike he frequently stopped at the Dekker frame shop, where he met numerous painters from the region and was exposed to their work. This led him to take private art lessons with A. G. Hulshof Pol, a well-known local painter and art teacher who instilled in him an abiding interest in landscape and cityscape painting, with most of Rijlaarsdam’s works focused on figures moving through towns, factories, and industrial areas throughout his life. Although he traveled frequently to Bruges and Antwerp to develop his drawing skills, in order to support his family during the difficult 1930s he became a draftsman, using his talent to design buildings and industrial complexes. In the 1940s he became a part of the St. Lucas Art Society of Amsterdam, and was so prolific that he received a royal subsidy for the rest of his working life. After World War II he also became a member of the Gooise Art Society and the Society of Figurative Art in Hilversum, and began to divide his time evenly between his home country and the city of Paris, which became one of his greatest sources of inspiration. In the 1970s he first traveled to Spain, which led him to incorporate brighter colors into his palette as well as exploring more abstract works after being exposed first-hand to the works of Picasso and Dali. Constantly innovating, his oeuvre ranged from impressionistic to expressionist to realistic, inspired in the moment by the artists and art around him. In the 1980s he suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered, and he painted less and less as he convalesced at a quieter home in Baarn on the outskirts of Hilversum, where he passed away on February 16th, 2007. Today the largest public collection of his works can be found at the Singer Museum in Laren, to the north of Hilversum, with most of his pieces in private collections throughout Europe and the Americas.