Dutch painter and draughtsman.
She was the daughter of the Dutch painter J. E. van Heemskerck van Beest (1828–94). She studied at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague and in 1901 moved to the Gooiland area, north of Utrecht, where she was taught printmaking by Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig. In 1904–5 she lived in Paris, working in the studio of Eugène Carrière. From 1906 she spent her summers at the country house of the collector and patron Marie Tak van Poortvliet (1871–1936), near Domburg, where a studio was set up for her in the garden. From 1908 van Heemskerck painted landscapes in a luministic style (drawings, Rotterdam, Boymans–van Beuningen) under the influence of Jan Toorop and Piet Mondrian, who also spent the summers in Domburg during that time and by whom she was taught. Around 1911 she was influenced by Cubism, but shortly afterwards her work showed the influence of German Expressionism and of Kandinsky’s abstract art (Painting 1914, 1914; The Hague, Gemeentemus.). This stage in her development owed much to Herwarth Walden, who in 1912 organized exhibitions in the Netherlands of the work of the Italian Futurists and of Kandinsky, and in 1913 of Franz Marc. Marie Tak van Poortvliet’s collection of contemporary paintings was also an important point of contact with the European avant-garde for van Heemskerck; it included works by Mondrian, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Lyonel Feininger, Marc and Kandinsky.