She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam before going to South Africa at the age of 21.

In Africa she met her future husband, and they were married in Java where they lived before returning in 1907 to Netherlands where their four children were born.

[3] The family came to California in 1918 and lived for ten years on a farm near Santa Cruz.

There are more than 80 venues, primarily Christian churches, in six states of the US which contain her stained glass works; however, the great majority of her windows are in 40 cities and towns in California, in addition to a total of 9 churches in the states of Nevada, Washington, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Louisiana.

She donated three works of art to India, two of which can be found on public display: the woodcarving "Satyagraha" in the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi[5] and a stained glass plaque depicting a poem in Sanskrit by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, which is in the Tagore Museum at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, Bolpur, West Bengal, India.