Jan Mankes

Jan Mankes is a Dutch artist who produced a lot of paintings, drawings and prints. He died of tuberculosis at an age of 30. His restrained, detailed work ranged from self-portraits to landscapes and studies of birds and animals. He was a progressive protestant and he married in 1915 Anne Zernike, the country's first female minister and Mennonite with a doctoral degree.
Mankes is categorized as a symbolic realist but the abstract qualities of Mankes's Work according to Carel Peeters, a Dutch literary critic, remove him from both symbolism and realism. When working with oil-paints he brought a transparency to the paint. In his self portraits you can notice he gave his skin a rather sickly appearance.
One of his favorite animals he painted a lot, was his owl.