Portrait of Jan van den Tempel

At the end of 2002 IISH received a very fine, valuable portrait of Minister Van den Tempel, painted by Jan Sluijters (1881-1957). Until 2002, this portrait had been owned by Van den Tempel's family.
Jan van den Tempel (1877 - 1955) was a social democrat and member of a trade union from the very beginning.
He was secretary of the NVV (Dutch association of trade unions) and member of the council of Amsterdam and Parliament for the SDAP (social democratic labour party). He was one of the first socialists in the Netherlands to become a cabinet minister (in 1939), and remained a minister until 1944, as member of the cabinet Gerbrandy in exile in London.

BWSA (biographical dictionary of socialism and the workers' movement in the Netherlands) contains a more extensive biography of J. van den Tempel - text in Dutch

Jan Sluijters was long one of the most popular painters in the Netherlands. Around 1905 he and Mondriaan introduced new art styles from France; one of these was luminism.
Sluijters was one of the strong forces behind the Modern Kunstkring (modern art society), founded in 1911. He experimented with futurism and cubism. In the years after 1905 his work was considered controversial because the wild colours he used were strange to the public. Moreover, depictions of naked women caused regular exclusion of his paintings from exhibitions.
In addition to his experimental work, he also painted naturalistic portraits. From the twenties on it became popular to have your portrait done by Sluijters. Among the well known Dutch people he painted were Cardinal van Rossum, politician Wibaut, and entrepreneurs such as Willem Dreesmann and Philips. He was decorated several times, and in 1952 he was knighted in de Order of the Nederlandse Leeuw (a Dutch royal order).

Sluijters also did political drawings for the newspaper Nieuwe Amsterdammer. The IISH collections contain many of his (printed) drawings from the years 1915-1919.
In addition to these drawings, he also created many designs for posters and book covers.