Jan Mankes - Lily Field, 1912

Jan Mankes (1889–1920)

Lily Field

Signed with monogram lower right “J. Mankes”

c. 1912

Oil on canvas

27 x 22 cm

Condition:

In very good condition.

Provenance:

Kunsthandel J.C. Schüller, The Hague 1912; S.L. van Alphen, Haarlem and heirs; Kunsthandel Ivo Bouwman 2020.

Literature:

Jan de Lange and Maarten van Doremalen, Jan Mankes – Mooie dingen zijn zo eenvoudig (catalogue raisonné), cat. no. 25-102.

Exhibition: Jan Mankes - Verstilling en Strijd, 25 January – 24 August 2025, Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen.

Bob Scholte Fine Art acted as intermediary between Kunsthandel Ivo Bouwman and a client with a specific search request.

Additional information:

Jan Mankes is regarded as one of the most sensitive artists in Dutch art history. His quiet view of landscape, animals and still life earned him the nickname ‘Holland’s most tranquil painter’. From his peaceful surroundings he observed nature with almost monastic attention, reducing every bird, flower and play of light to an intimate, concentrated essence.

Mankes’s oeuvre is small but exceptionally coherent. It is a world of silence, detail and poetic clarity that continues to resonate deeply. His work has received renewed attention at Museum Belvédère and Museum Arnhem. With very thin brushstrokes and subtle, often bright accents of colour, he depicts animals in their natural surroundings, flowers at the point between bloom and decay, and loved ones such as his wife Annie Mankes Zernike. That restrained melancholy, and the awareness of fragility and transience, runs as a quiet undercurrent through his work.

Despite his early death at just thirty, Mankes’s reputation lives on. His drawings, prints and paintings are rarely offered on the market and are treasured by museums including the Rijksmuseum, Museum Belvédère, Museum MORE, Museum Arnhem and Museum Møhlmann. His oeuvre remains an anchor for anyone looking for calm, attention and purity in art.