Etie van Rees - Very beautiful 1950s watercolor "children in a storm at sea" signed

• Beautifully detailed watercolor on paper "children in storm at sea", painted in the 1950s by the famous Dutch/Indonesian artist Etie van Rees (1890-1973). The watercolor, placed in a paper passe-partout, is in good condition and has sheet dimensions 21 x 25cm (HxW).

Eelcoline Adrienne van Rees was a Dutch painter, draftsman and ceramist. Etie (also Eetie) van Rees was born in the Dutch East Indies as the daughter of Daniel François Willem van Rees (1863-1934) and Eelcoline Pruijs van der Hoeven (1867-1947). She came from a family of administrators, her father was director of the Domestic Administration and vice-president of the Council of the Dutch East Indies. He was a son of Governor-General Otto van Rees. On her mother's side she was a granddaughter of Abraham Pruijs van der Hoeven, governor of Aceh.
Like many Dutch East Indies people, Van Rees went to Europe to learn; she was educated in Lausanne and The Hague. In The Hague, she received eight months of lessons from the Hague painter Bernard Schregel, but otherwise she was an autodidact as an artist. She painted, made watercolours and drawings, and also made etchings and lithographs; she exhibited several times in the Dutch East Indies. In 1911, Van Rees married the Scottish businessman Neil Mac Neill, with whom she had four children. The marriage did not last and after the First World War, Van Rees and her children settled in the Netherlands. In 1924, the family moved to Wassenaar. In 1928, she illustrated the book De fabel van het dwarf deer by Marie van Zeggelen. As Eetie van Rees, she published the fairy tale book De nachtmannetjes in 1946, which she illustrated herself. She became a member of the Pulchri Studio and 'de Grafische' and exhibited her watercolours and drawings several times.
In 1952 Van Rees also started working with ceramics. Together with Harm Kamerlingh Onnes she was one of the first to make ceramic sculptures. She became known to a wider audience with her imaginative animal figures, which she called crawlies. For each animal she first made a number of design sketches. The primitive decorations are partly derived from Javanese culture. In 1959 she won a gold medal at an international ceramics exhibition in Ostend. Five years later the exhibition 'Between man and animal, ceramics by Etie van Rees' was held in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which then also travelled to other museums.
From 1969 Van Rees lived in Aerdenhout. She died in 1973, at the age of 83. A year later a memorial exhibition was held in Het Kapelhuis. In 1990 a large retrospective of her work took place in the Princessehof in Leeuwarden.
(source: Metzemaekers)