After the Beckmanns had travelled to the Netherlands on 17 July 1937 posing as holidaymakers, they first stayed at the Bank guesthouse at Beethovenstraat 89 before finding a flat with a studio in a typical Amsterdam canal house at Rokin 85, with a former tobacco warehouse serving as Beckmann’s studio (at the end of September/beginning of October of the same year with the help of the art historian Hans Jaffé). The flat with two rooms - only separated by a sliding door – was relatively small, and the improvised kitchen could be reached via a ladder-like staircase and was separated off by a curtain. Mathilde Q. Beckmann furnished the place at the end of September while Beckmann was on a trip to France with Baron Rudolf von Simolin and Stephan Lackner. A letter to her husband, in which she tells him about her progress painting and decorating the studio and flat, was preserved in one of his sketchbooks. She asked his opinion about the colour scheme and his response was, it should “on no account be too gaudy” (Max Beckmann Letters Vol.3, No. 666).

In the spring of 1939, the Beckmanns spent some time in Paris where the painter kept another studio and considered giving up the flat at Rokin 85 to move to the French capital. As Mathilde Q. Beckmann wrote in a letter to her sister Hedda, if war broke out, the Netherlands would most certainly be involved. In retrospect Max Beckmann remarked in an interview (newspaper article in St. Louis Post Dispatch 1947) that it had been a mistake to remain in the Netherlands and not to emigrate instead to Switzerland, for example.

In 1947, when Beckmann travelled to the USA for the first time because his future after the War seemed uncertain, he kept the Rokin flat. From another letter by Mathilde Q. Beckmann to her sister in October 1947, it is apparent that during their absence the flat had been broken into and some things they were quite attached to had been stolen. Only after their definite emigration to the United States in September 1948 and after having received their entrance visa to the US, did the Beckmanns finally give up their place of exile at Rokin 85.