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My dear friend Jan, You will soon remember me if I say that I'm the soldier you started to paint. The corporal holding the pipe? First of all, I cannot say what has happened to me since last I saw you.
A friend of the brushes and paint
Leslie Dowson, corporal of the RAF Pioneer Corps, wrote these words to Jan Heesters on April 18, 1945. Dowson is one of the pilots who found safe shelter with painter Heesters after being stranded on a military mission. And what kind of place, if you also have an artistic nature and are 'a friend of the brushes and paint'. What Dowson could not describe in his letter, he expressed through his drawings of the landing on the Normandy coast during D-Day. As a constructor of emergency landing strips, the originally advertising and decorative artist was involved in the invasion on June 6, 1944. While waiting in his landing craft in the midst of the violence, he recorded what he saw happening around him with only his fountain pen and a jar of water: The immense fleet packed into the channel, under the roar of cannon, against the pale reflection of the waves; the sky filled with barrages of balloons, and countless planes flying ominously between them.
It is not known exactly how Leslie Dowson ended up at Heesters in 1943. This was probably arranged by Chaplain Woestenburg, who played a major role in the resistance and the reception and accommodation of Allied soldiers in Schijndel during the war years. One of the permanent hiding places was that of painter Jan Heesters at Pompstraat 17. False identity cards and receipts were made on the etching press in Jan's studio. Several pilots hid safely in a small shelter room in his attic for a while. Heesters provided his 'guests' with a normal costume to replace the military uniform and simply left them in the garden behind the house. In addition, they served as models for drawings and paintings. Not only for Heesters himself, but also for his then student Kees Bol, to whom Leslie Dowson asks in his letter to convey his warmest regards.
Through such a portrait drawing, one of the captured pilots reportedly later recognized a fellow sufferer in a prisoner of war camp in Belgium and sent him 'Greetings from Jan Heesters'.
Leslie Dowson survived the war, as is evident from the letter he wrote to Heesters. His own drawings of the landing on June 6, 1944 and other war scenes have long adorned the walls of his house in Sheffield. He died in 2003 at the age of 88.
