Ode to Tonia Stieltjes | Activist, painter's model and 'willpower doctor'

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Dear Tonia,

I admiringly saw the exhibition about you at the Singer Museum in Laren. You had a very eventful life. You were an activist, a painting model and you call yourself a 'willpower doctor'.

You were born (28 March 1881) in Amsterdam's Czaar Peterstraat, the eldest daughter of Cristiaan Anthony Milgens and Maria Geertruida Heidman. They gave your the name Gesina Antonia.

Your father was born into slavery and bought free at 24. He sailed the seas and in 1879 he settled in Amsterdam. Here, he falls in love with the red-haired maid Maria. After you, two more brothers were born but they died in infancy. You lived in a poor area with many slum dwellings. Not a very healthy environment. Did you perhaps catch an infection there that made you go blind?

You then went internally to the Institute for the Blind on Vossiusstraat. There you learn to fiddle, compose and sing. Fortunately, you regain your sight in one eye when you turn 18.

Like your mother, you become a servant with the well-known Wibaut family. Mathilde Wibaut is active with women's suffrage and you learn to write from her. She also involves you in founding the Social Democratic Women's Propaganda Club.

You become a board member of the servants' union 'Allen voor elkander'. Later, you chair the union and become the first coloured trade union woman. You write regularly in the servant magazine 'Ons Streven' and organise meetings and outings and speak at conferences. You ensure that the hated tip system (guests give tips to servants) is replaced by 10 per cent pay rise.

You become pregnant in 1908 and marry photographer Jan de Meijere. You are in artistic circles but in 1915 your marriage ends.

You get a relationship with Wim Stieltjes and together with the children you leave for Paris. Thanks to an inheritance received by Wim, you support artists financially. Your house becomes a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. Did you meet Jan Sluyters then? He asks you as a model and he makes no fewer than twelve portraits and nudes of you. Wim Schuhmacher also makes a portrait and calls it 'mulattin'.

You also meet Piet Mondrian and you get on well with him. He enjoys talking to you about his work, his abstract art. You also share a love of jazz music. Piet is distraught when you die at the age of 51; you are buried in Paris.

Antonia Stieltjes, you certainly had a very eventful life.