Jan Meefout

Jan Meefout received his training at the Applied Arts School Quellinus, the Nieuwe Kunstschool and with Jan Bronner and Frits van Hall at the State Academy of Art in Amsterdam. Throughout his life he lived and worked mainly in Amsterdam, where he was a woodworking teacher at the teacher training college and a sculpture teacher at the Academy of Visual Education. He was married to the Berlin sculptor (Alwine Bertha) Irmgard Stahl (1911-2001). Meefout was a member of Arti et Amicitiae, the Professional Association of Visual Artists BBK, the Netherlands Artists Association and the Dutch Circle of Sculptors NKVB.

Jan Meefout preferred to work with the materials wood and stone, his favorite subject was women, especially his own wife Irmgard. He is seen as the pre-eminent sculptor of the sensual female figure, with round, plump shapes of the somewhat stocky bodies. The images tend slightly towards abstraction, but he has never left the figuration. Meefout was known for not wanting to sell his statues.

He often received commissions from the municipality of Amsterdam, among others, through Hildo Krop, with whom he felt related. His well-known creations are: Resting Woman, which he had first made smaller in Belgian bluestone; Elephant, the bronze fountain in Amsterdam's Sloterplas and Venus, which is part of the Meefout collection of Museum Beelden aan Zee in The Hague. Meefout also made the baptismal font for the Meinardskerk in Minnertsga in Friesland.

A few months before his death, documentary maker Ben Mathon made a documentary about Jan Meefout for the Japanese public broadcaster NHK. This documentary was already recorded in High Definition in 1993, making it the first Dutch HDTV production that was also broadcast in this format in Japan.