Winterlandschap te Eerbeek 1899 - 1920

Jan Mankes made this drawing, Winter Landscape at Eerbeek, using pencil on paper. What strikes me first about this work is the incredibly light touch of the pencil – it’s almost like a whisper on the page. It's so subtle, so quiet, and yet it conveys so much about the stillness of a winter day. Look at the way the artist has rendered the sky, with these delicate, horizontal lines that create a sense of vastness and openness. You can almost feel the chill in the air. And then there’s the way the trees are drawn, so bare and skeletal, their branches reaching up like delicate fingers. It feels like a landscape stripped back to its bare essentials, where everything is reduced to its simplest form. Mankes was a contemporary of Piet Mondrian, and you can see something of that same reductive impulse at work here. Except where Mondrian went towards pure abstraction, Mankes finds something essential in the natural world.