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The painter Jeanne Bieruma Oosting spent her childhood on large family estates in Lochem and Friesland. This relatively isolated existence, in close contact with nature, had a major influence on the themes of her work: the animals in her garden, landscapes and village views from the areas where she lived. She also painted portraits. She mastered a large number of techniques and experimented with them freely. Her subjects, in which the man dominates with his fears, dreams and visions, were very unusual for a woman of her time.
Born into an aristocratic environment, where an artistic career for a girl was frowned upon, Bieruma Oosting ignored the conventions of her time and pursued her deepest desire to become an artist. In her long career she created an extensive oeuvre that includes oil paintings, watercolours, graphics and works on paper. Driven and passionate in her artistry, she was one of the progressive women who fought for a free and independent life in the early 20th century. During her life she experienced almost all 20th-century modern art styles and movements, but she would always continue to work figuratively.
From the age of sixteen, Oosting received her first painting lessons in Lochem, where her parents moved from her hometown of Leeuwarden. She then comes under the care of the Deventer painter Paul Bodifée. Despite the fact that her elders have serious objections to further education in art, as this would waste her chances of marriage, Jeanne continues with her artistic plans. She enrolled at the School for Arts and Crafts in Haarlem and then moved to The Hague where she was taught by Albert Roelofs and Willem van Konijnenburg. She also takes classes at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. During those years she also joined Pulchri Studio in The Hague and 'De Onafhankelijken' in Amsterdam.
Encouraged by the sculptor Charlotte van Pallandt, Oosting left for Paris in 1929, where she would spend eleven years. There her development as a person and as an artist gains momentum and her career takes off. She immerses herself in nightlife, becomes acquainted with (lesbian) love and finds friendship and collegiality in the circle around Conrad Kickert and Wim Oepts. She learned new printing techniques from the graphic artist Stanley Hayter, with which she made an international name for herself, especially with her series of sketches of female nudes in brothels. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Jeanne returns to Amsterdam. When her mother dies a few years after the war, she was able to afford a country house in Almen with an inheritance and then lives alternately in Amsterdam, Almen and Paris. In Almens she receives friends such as Adriaan Roland Holst, Charlotte van Pallandt and Kees Verwey. She also travels within Europe, but also to the United States and regularly refreshes her knowledge of graphic techniques in Hayter's studio in Paris.
Bieruma Oosting received much appreciation for her work, usually executed in a more or less impressionistic style. From around 1940 her colour gradually changed from dark brown tones to an expressionist colour palette and her canvases became increasingly colourful and sunnier. She painted well into old age and died in Almen at the age of 96.
