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Fans talk about their favorite Melle artwork. First up is actor and painter Jeroen Krabbé (1944), a former student of Melle.

Jeroen Krabbé: "Melle played an enormous role in my life. I took lessons from him for a year, on Saturday mornings, together with three others. The run-up to those lessons was rather bitter. Marino, the 12-year-old son of actress Sylvia de Leur and her husband Aart Gisolf [the television doctor], died in an accident in 1975 in front of his mother. He was hit by a cement truck while riding his bike.

A few months later, Melle rang the couple's doorbell. He had met them when he was interviewed on television with Sylvia by Berend Boudewijn. When Gisolf opened the door, Melle asked, ‘Son, do you have a cup of coffee for the painter?’ A week later, Melle dropped by unannounced again. On that occasion, he asked Gisolf, 'You like to draw, don't you? You know what we're going to do? We're going to start a drawing club. Ask a few more people, and we'll do some model drawing together.'

"When Aart invited me, I was thrilled. In 1972, I had seen Melle's major retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gemeentemuseum in Arnhem. I thought he was a hero, a magician. When I had performed in a play, I would sometimes drive to his house on Weteringschans. Sometimes you could see Melle painting in front of the window. I would sit in my car and watch him for an hour.

For a year, we gathered at Sylvia and Aart's home on Saturday mornings. Ellen van Hemert [actress and painter] was also there. We used charcoal to draw the same woman, a nude model arranged by Melle. On those mornings, I learned lessons that I still enjoy today. Melle would sometimes stand behind me, put a hand on my shoulder, and whisper, ‘Boy, you shouldn't dwell on your failure.’ In other words, don't keep struggling when a drawing fails, but tear it up and grab a new sheet of paper. He was constantly sprinkling us with fundamental truths. “Don't go to Paris via Meppel,” but keep it simple. In return, he expected us to bring him 'tompoezen' every Saturday. We had to buy them from bakeries with blonde women behind the counter. That way, you wouldn't see any loose hairs on the pastries, he said.

On May 27, 1976, Melle would have turned 68. A few days before that, the art club treated him to dinner at a restaurant in Loosdrecht. We had a giant tompoes cake made at a pastry shop, and I bought a large dildo-shaped candle at a sex shop to go with it. That cake with a penis was in the back of my car; it would be our dessert at the restaurant. During dinner, Melle took four envelopes out of his inside pocket. They contained a beautiful lithograph of him, The Slanderer, which he handed to Sylvia, Ellen, and me. I asked who the fourth envelope was for. “It's for the Messiah,” Melle replied. Halfway through the main course, he went outside for some fresh air. When he was leaning over a car in a strange way in the parking lot, Aart, the doctor among us, was shocked. He immediately took Melle to the hospital. Half an hour later, a waiter came to our table with a phone call for Sylvia from her husband. She returned to the table in tears. “Not again, not again,” she repeated at first. Then she told us that Melle had died of a heart attack.

On his birthday, he lay in state in his house, under a flag of Amsterdam and surrounded by his paintings. After his death, I fell into a crisis. I had just decided that I wanted to paint more and act less. Melle had been a guiding light in that decision. He had said to my father, ‘You know what it is with your Jeroen? That boy has it in his hands. He just hasn't had enough practice.’ When my father told me that, it felt like I had won a gold medal: Melle thought I could paint.

During that same period, I met Princess Beatrix at the premiere of Soldier of Orange [the war film in which Krabbé played a leading role]. I knew she loved sculpting. I asked her, “Once you become queen, how will you find time for your studio?” Her answer – ‘I keep one day a week free in my diary for that’ – was such an eye-opener for me. The next day, I enrolled at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, the art academy where my grandfather and father had also studied. I was 32 at the time, actually too old, but I was eventually accepted based on drawings I had made on Saturday mornings at Melle's studio. Because I was such a well-known actor due to the success of Soldier of Orange, the other students looked at me strangely. After two months, I didn't dare go anymore; I felt so scrutinized. When I hadn't shown up for a while, Friso ten Holt, one of the teachers, persuaded me to come back. I studied there for another three years.

"My favorite Melle artwork is Dead Boy, his very last, unfinished painting. Melle spent a long time tinkering with that painting. During the last month he taught us, he told us he was working on a painting of a dead child. It looked like the child was sleeping the whole time, Melle grumbled. But during the last lesson, he said with relief, 'I've killed him.' After his death, that painting was still on the easel in his studio. Van Puck, his widow, gave it to me as a gift.

Immediately afterwards, I created an In Memoriam painting, Melle is dead. It is a portrait of him together with Death, a woman holding paintbrushes in her hands. The canvas also features houses as Melle painted them and the Koepelkerk in Amsterdam. I painted that because Melle once told me that there is a street named after me there, the Jeroenensteeg. In the background is a forest. I once showed Melle a nude I had painted. “A wildly good painting,” he said, “but there needs to be a forest behind it.” When I said I didn't know how to do that, he grabbed some brushes and in a few minutes painted a forest behind the nude, with a small lake in front of it and a boat.

“Damn, that's beautiful, Melle,” I stammered.

“Did you watch closely how I did that?” he asked.

When I nodded, he grabbed a cloth and wiped away the forest. “Now you,” he said.