Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest. 1876-1923. Schilderes uit roeping

This monograph, titled Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest 1876-1923, schilderes uit roeping, focuses on the life and work of the avant-garde artist Jacoba van Heemskerck. For more than ten years she occupied a prominent position in the world of modern art in the Netherlands. During a relatively short creative period in the early decades of the twentieth century, her versatile oeuvre, consisting of paintings, drawings, graphic works, stained glass windows and glass mosaics, underwent an exciting development from figuration to abstraction.
Her innovative artistic works from that time show an unmistakably spontaneous identity and character. Trees and sailing boats are motifs which recur frequently. Van Heemskerck worked in The Hague and Domburg. After 1913 she became part of the expressionist avant-garde group 'Der Sturm' in Berlin, where Herwarth Walden was the dominant figure. Stimulated by painters such as Mondriaan and Kandinsky, Van Heemskerck followed her own path, guided by the spiritual insights of Rudolf Steiner, which took her work to almost total abstraction. The stained glass windows she made for public buildings, in which she depicted her ideal of a spiritual world, are a high point in her oeuvre.