Born in Ostend, Holland Jan de Clerck studied briefly with the painter Camille Payen in Brussels around the turn of the century, but was, for the most part, self-taught. He was much influenced by the exhibitions organized by the group La Libre Esthétique, and his first paintings date from the late 1890s.

Quickly gaining in confidence and ability, De Clerck first exhibited his paintings in 1905. He soon developed an original technique of a sort of elongated pointillism of striped brushstrokes, producing landscapes and seascapes tinged with a Symbolist* aesthetic. As one modern writer has noted of the artist, de Clerck 'adapted pointillism* and the concentration of light to produce his own technique, often worked in mixed media, of dr...