Dutch portrait painter, member of a noted painters family.
She was the second child of the Dutch-American painter Johann Georg Schwartze and Maria Elisabeth Therese Herrmann (1825). They got four daughters and a son. One younger sister died in 1856, but her surviving siblings became artists. Her cousin, the “Jofferen” paintress and illustrator Lizzy Ansingh was educated by her. Theresia herself, studied as a teenager under her father, then for a year under Gabriel van Max and the leading portrait painter Franz von Lenbach in München. In 1879 she studied in Paris under Jean-Jacques Henner and Léon Bonnat.
At age 15 she got her first assignments: portraits for the families Van Loon, Borski en Sillem. In 1874, when her father died, she became the breadwinner of the family at the Prinsengracht. At age 34 she was a noted portrait painter, wanted in Paris and the Netherlands. To her clients belonged the members of the Dutch royal family. She was a regular jury member and quest in artistic circles.
Besides portraits she also painted genre scenes. She exhibited in Europe and the United States. In 1896 she became the first woman appointed Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau. Her work, consisting of more then thousand pieces, is seen in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Rijksuseum and Jewish historical museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. But some 900 portraits are in private property.
Like many Amsterdam “Joffers”, Theresia never got children. On 30 Augustus 1906, she (age 55) married in Amsterdam her 77 years aged friend Anton Gillis Cornelis van Duyl (8 December 1829, Brielle – 22 July 1918, Amsterdam). Anton was a widower and the former main editor of Algemeem Handelsblad (1866 – 1885). When Anton died, she mas mentally broken. She kept on working, but on 23 December 1918, she also died of an internal disease.
Her sister Georgine made in in 1922 a gravetomb, that can be found at the Oosterbegraafplaats in Amsterdam.
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