Bernard van Vlijmen was born in Den Haag, and lived in Nijmegen until 1910. He studied at the Amsterdam Royal Academy and was mostly active in advertising art and book illustrations in the 1920s and 1930s. In Amsterdam van Vlijmen developed into a much sought-after painter of cityscapes and portraits of actors, actresses and politicians. In 1952, he painted a life-size portrait of the future Queen Elizabeth II, which is now in Buckingham Palace. He travelled frequently to Italy, Spain, Switzerland and South America. From 1963 he lived permanently in Bardolino, Italy. The style of his drawings and paintings was naturalistic. The motif of a finish in a bicycle race as in his Finish of Cycling Road Race is included in a calendar illustrated by van Vlijmen for the 1928 Olympic Games commissioned by the Holland-America Line.
Netherlands