Jan Schiltmeijer: The Painter Who Followed Love Across an Ocean

Quick Bio

Deatil	Info
Full Name	Jan Schiltmeijer
Born	Approximately early 1980s — Haarlem, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
What He Does	Professional visual artist specializing in original acrylic portrait paintings
Biggest Accomplishments	Built a self-sustaining painting career without ever having a website in his early years; held a solo exhibition in Brooklyn at I.M.A.G.E. gallery in 2014; relocated from Amsterdam to New York to pursue his art career and marry comedian Amber Ruffin; developed a distinctive layered acrylic technique that earned him international clients
Other Key Facts	Studied art direction at the Junior Academy in Amsterdam; worked as an advertising art director for approximately two years before switching to full-time painting in 2004; was married to comedian, writer, and television host Amber Ruffin from 2010 until their divorce was finalized on December 5, 2023 at the Rockland County Supreme Court in New York

Why People Search His Name

Jan Schiltmeijer is not the kind of person who shows up in press releases or turns up on entertainment television. He has a private Instagram. He doesn’t give interviews. His name, in fact, might never have entered the American public consciousness at all — except that he was married for thirteen years to one of the sharpest comedic voices of her generation.

When Amber Ruffin tells a story about her Dutch husband on Seth Meyers, or mentions him in a Today Show interview, people get curious. And when the divorce became public in late 2023 — revealed when Amber made the announcement on what she said she intended as an April Fools’ joke, then clarified was real — people got curious again.

What they find when they dig in is a genuine artist. A man who studied his craft seriously, quit a stable advertising career to paint full-time, built a client base in the Netherlands, crossed the Atlantic for love, and quietly kept painting in Brooklyn while his wife became a late-night television star. That’s not a celebrity story. But it is, in its own way, a real one.

Haarlem, Holland: Where the Story Begins

Jan was born in Haarlem, a city in the Dutch province of North Holland that sits about fifteen kilometers west of Amsterdam, just far enough from the capital to have its own identity. Haarlem is actually older than Amsterdam — it was a trading city before Amsterdam became a port — and it has a long artistic tradition. The city gave its name to the Harlem neighborhood in New York, settled by Dutch colonists in the 1600s.

For someone who would eventually end up painting in Brooklyn, that historical thread is kind of perfect.

The public record doesn’t include details about Jan’s parents or family background, and he has never offered them publicly. What the record does tell us is that his upbringing in Haarlem, followed by his move to Amsterdam for his education and early career, set the geographic and cultural foundations of who he became.

The Netherlands has a relationship with visual art that goes back centuries — Vermeer, Rembrandt, van Gogh are all Dutch. Whether Jan grew up with that specific history consciously present or not, he came of age in a country where taking painting seriously as a profession isn’t treated as eccentric or impractical. It’s one of the things the Dutch have always done.

Amsterdam, the Junior Academy, and Learning to See

After growing up in Haarlem, Jan moved to Amsterdam for school. He enrolled in the Junior Academy — a program offering art direction training — and completed a three-year specialized course there. The program was focused on the commercial and visual arts side of creativity: understanding how images communicate, how composition works, how you direct a viewer’s eye.

Art direction is a discipline that lives between pure fine art and commercial application. It’s the field where designers, illustrators, and visual thinkers end up when they want to apply their creativity to problems that have clients attached to them — advertising campaigns, editorial design, brand identity. Studying it gives you rigor. You learn that images have to work, not just look good. That what something communicates matters as much as how it looks.

After finishing the Junior Academy, Jan did what the training was designed for: he went to work as an art director in Amsterdam’s advertising industry. He spent around two years doing it. And then he stopped.

The Quit That Changed Everything: 2004

In 2004, Jan Schiltmeijer left advertising and began painting full-time. He was probably in his early twenties — old enough to have tested the corporate path and young enough to still walk away from it without too much lost.

This is the kind of decision that sounds romantic in hindsight and looks terrifying in the moment. Advertising art direction pays. Freelance painting, especially when you’re just starting out and nobody knows your name, doesn’t guarantee anything. You’re betting on your own talent, your own discipline, and your ability to find people who want what you make before the money runs out.

Jan’s specific approach to painting is grounded in acrylic portraiture — a medium that rewards patience and precision. He developed a technique that builds images in layers, adding depth and richness through accumulated paint rather than through any single gesture. The result is work that has a quality of presence to it — faces that hold your gaze, colors that feel weighted.

What’s remarkable about his early career is the clients came anyway. Before he had a website. Before there was any reason for anyone outside his immediate network to know his name, he was apparently building a real clientele in Amsterdam through word of mouth and through the quality of the work itself. His own website biography, which he wrote himself, notes this directly: he built up quite a clientele without ever having a website, before he moved to America and got married.

That sentence is doing a lot of work. It tells you he was already established. The move wasn’t a career leap of faith — it was a life leap of faith. The career was already working.

New York, Amber Ruffin, and Their Story of Meeting

Here’s where the story takes a turn that Amber has described publicly, so we have it from the best possible source.

Amber Ruffin arrived in Amsterdam to work with Boom Chicago, an American comedy theater based in the city that has been training and performing sketch comedy and improv for decades. It’s launched several notable careers — Seth Meyers, Jordan Peele, and others all have Amsterdam Boom Chicago connections. Amber was there as a writer and performer.

At some point, Boom Chicago took their show on tour to New York. And Jan — who was just on vacation in New York at the same time — crossed paths with her there. So: two people who both lived in Amsterdam, meeting in New York, because of a comedy tour and a coincidental vacation. Amber tells it with the affection of someone who finds the logistics genuinely funny — they met in New York, while living in Amsterdam, and then went back to Amsterdam together.

They dated for a couple of years in Amsterdam. Then Amber’s career pulled her toward America, toward the writers’ rooms and comedy clubs and late-night television that would eventually make her famous. Jan packed his paints and followed.

They married in 2010. They settled in the New York area — specifically in what appears to be the Rockland County region north of the city, based on where the divorce was later processed. Jan set up his studio practice in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Years: Painting While the World Watched His Wife

Here’s what Jan was doing during the years when Amber Ruffin became a public figure: he was painting.

He held an exhibition at the I.M.A.G.E. gallery in Brooklyn in 2014, which was a real public moment for his art career in the American market. The gallery was a chance to show his acrylic portraits to a New York audience on his own terms — not as the husband of someone famous, but as an artist with his own visual language.

He works with what he describes as standard equipment — paints, canvases, brushes — without elaborate technique or exotic materials. The work comes from precision, patience, and the accumulated effect of layering. Subjects include portraits of both celebrities and everyday people. He has described himself as guaranteeing one hundred percent satisfaction with every painting, which is the kind of quiet confidence that takes years to earn.

His Instagram is private. His website is functional and simple — a portfolio and a brief bio, not a self-promotion machine. He doesn’t appear at Hollywood events. He doesn’t show up in entertainment coverage.

Amber, meanwhile, became a writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, then launched The Amber Ruffin Show on Peacock, then co-wrote the book for the Broadway revival of The Wiz. Her career trajectory during the years of their marriage was remarkable — she became one of the few Black women to host her own late-night show, and she did it with a style that was entirely her own. Through all of that, Jan was painting. Their life together was, by most appearances, a genuine partnership between two people working in completely different creative worlds.

Amber has said publicly that early in their marriage they had to navigate real cultural differences — particularly around race. Jan, coming from the Netherlands, had not grown up with the same understanding of American racial dynamics that Amber had lived her entire life. They had conversations about it. He learned. She described it as something they worked through together.

The Divorce and a New Chapter

On December 5, 2023, the Rockland County Supreme Court in New York finalized the divorce between Amber Ruffin and Jan Schiltmeijer. They had been married for thirteen years.

Amber announced it publicly in a way that was very Amber Ruffin — she initially framed it as an April Fools’ joke, then clarified that it wasn’t. She made the announcement on Late Night with Seth Meyers. The news circulated. And then both of them went back to their lives.

There were no public allegations, no dramatic statements, no media war. It ended quietly, the way things end when the people involved have chosen dignity over spectacle.

Jan remains in New York. His website is still active. He is still a painter.

The Financial Picture

Jan Schiltmeijer’s finances are not publicly documented in any reliable detail. His net worth has been estimated online at figures ranging from around $500,000 to $1 million, though these are clearly rough calculations based on what a working professional artist might accumulate over two decades of sustained work. He sells original paintings, has sold commissioned portraits, and has exhibited in galleries on at least two continents.

He is not wealthy in any celebrity sense. He is, by all available evidence, a working artist who has built a sustainable practice through skill and word of mouth — which in the art world is exactly how it’s supposed to work, and harder to achieve than it sounds.

Where He Stands in 2026

Jan Schiltmeijer is somewhere in his mid-forties, living in New York, still painting. His name comes up in searches primarily through his connection to Amber Ruffin, but the career that preceded her fame and survived the marriage intact is genuinely his own. He built a client base before the internet made that easy. He left a stable industry job to do something harder and more honest. He relocated across an ocean for a relationship, stayed in the new country after that relationship ended, and kept working.

The paintings are still available. The website is still up. The work continues.

Final Words

What I find genuinely admirable about Jan Schiltmeijer is the quietness of his commitment to his own work. He didn’t use his marriage to a rising comedic talent as a platform. He didn’t compose a substack about living in Brooklyn as a Dutch expat. He didn’t become a celebrity spouse. He painted.

There’s something almost unfashionably focused about a person who spends twenty years building a single creative practice — layering acrylic, portrait by portrait — while the culture around them moves at an increasingly frantic pace. He found his medium, developed his technique, built his audience through quality rather than noise, and kept going.

The marriage to Amber Ruffin gave him visibility he never sought. The divorce returned him to the kind of quiet he probably prefers. In both cases, the paintings were there.

FAQs

1. Who is Jan Schiltmeijer?

He is a professional Dutch painter who currently resides and works in New York. He was born in Haarlem, Netherlands. He specializes in acrylic portrait paintings built through a distinctive layer-by-layer technique. His most well-known public persona is that of comedian and TV broadcaster Amber Ruffin’s ex-husband.

2. Where did he grow up?

He was born in Haarlem, Holland, and grew up in Amsterdam, where he also completed his formal education and began his career.

3. What did he study?

He finished a three-year specialized program in art directing at the Junior Academy in Amsterdam.

4. When did he start painting full-time?

In 2004, after working as an advertising art director for approximately two years following graduation.

5. How did he meet Amber Ruffin?

They met in New York while both of them were actually living in Amsterdam. Amber was there working with Boom Chicago, an American comedy theater, and was on tour in New York at the same time Jan happened to be on vacation there. They began dating around 2008.

6. When did they get married?

In 2010, Amber, a Black American, and Jan, a white Dutchman, got married in what was called an interracial union. They spent about thirteen years together.

7. When did they divorce?

On December 5, 2023, the Rockland County Supreme Court in New York formalized their divorce. Amber announced it publicly on Late Night with Seth Meyers, initially framing it as an April Fools’ joke before clarifying it was real.

8. Did they have children?

No. During their marriage, various sources confirmed they did not have children.

9. What is Jan Schiltmeijer’s painting style?

He creates original acrylic portraits using a layer-by-layer technique that builds depth and richness over time. He works with standard equipment — brushes, canvases, and paint — without elaborate materials. He describes his work as offering deep, rich colors and vivid imagery.

10. Has he exhibited publicly?

Yes. He held a notable solo exhibition at the I.M.A.G.E. gallery in Brooklyn in 2014. He built his initial client base in Amsterdam before moving to New York, reportedly without even having a website during that early period.

11. Where is he now?

After the divorce, he still resides in New York, maintains an active website, and continues to paint. His Instagram account is private.

12. What is Jan Schiltmeijer’s net worth?

Not precisely documented. Online estimates range from around $500,000 to $1 million, based on a sustained career selling original paintings. He is a working professional artist, not wealthy in any celebrity sense.

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