Jumbo - Jan van Haasteren: Almost Ready? 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A building site with roughly two hundred people on it, and the thing being built is a swimming pool that is not remotely finished. Jan van Haasteren, the Dutch cartoonist whose puzzles are their own genre, and the man on the side of the box is already in his flippers.

What you are looking at

A large white concrete pool taking up the middle of the picture, empty, with workers still inside it laying tiles and steel mesh. A red concrete pump on a white truck reaching over the edge with its boom, a yellow cement mixer on the left, a site hut on the right with someone asleep in it, ladders, wheelbarrows, cable drums and a compressor.

And a crowd. Hundreds of spectators press against the fence on all sides in swimming costumes, holding towels and rubber rings, waiting to get in. Shops and apartment blocks behind, cars parked along the street, trees, dogs, and a man on the site hut roof doing something inadvisable. Somewhere in it there is a shark fin, which van Haasteren has drawn into every puzzle he has ever made, along with his other recurring motifs: a set of dentures, a pair of loose hands, Saint Nicholas and a self-portrait of the artist.

What it is like to build

The pool is the best gift a cartoon puzzle ever gives you. It is a large white geometric shape with hard straight edges sitting dead centre, so it fixes the composition immediately and splits the crowd into four manageable blocks around it.

Then work the machinery, since the red pump, the yellow mixer and the white truck are the only large saturated masses. The crowd is the long middle and it is the fun part, because every figure is two or three flat colours inside a hard black outline, so pieces carry usable information almost everywhere. There is no sky field and no empty ground anywhere in this picture, which is why dense cartoon puzzles are far more forgiving than they look.

Why Jumbo, and why this artist

Jumbo are Dutch and van Haasteren has drawn for them for decades, to the point that Jumbo set up a whole studio in 2013 to keep up with demand, with four other artists now working alongside him. The pictures are dense on purpose: the joke is that you keep finding things weeks after you have finished.

Specifications

A little context

Van Haasteren is one of very few artists in this category who sells a puzzle on the name rather than the picture. If you have not tried one, the 500 piece titles are the cheaper way in; if you already know you like them, the 1000 is where the detail properly rewards you. Derived from multiple public data sources across retail, search and community platforms, refreshed 31 August 2026.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.