Jan Verkade

A family visit to Cologne Cathedral and Trier, at the Porta Nigra, awakened Verkade's artistic passion for the Primitive and Classical.

He resisted expectations to join the family business and to be confirmed as Mennonite, and his father accepted Jan's decision to study at the Amsterdam State Academy of Fine Arts.

[3] He found two and a half years' study at the Rijksakademie, 1887–1889, technical but without spirit: seeking an artistic voice for his awakening religious sentiments in an age which glorified technology and city life, he courted rural solitude.

He lived in Hattem for two years where, disappointed by much contemporary literature, he began to find answers in Tolstoy's A Confession, Huysmans's A Rebours, and the works of Baudelaire and Verlaine.

'[7] Ranson and Sérusier followed a form of orientalized Theosophy, and Verkade was exposed to the resurgent esoteric mysticism, interest in the Kabbalah and magic arts, which the Symbolists absorbed.

He later acknowledged Jørgensen's view[8] that the Symbolist movement had inherited social preoccupations emerging into the void created between loss of belief in the Christian miraculous, and the spiritual bankruptcy of material science.

After some time at Le Pouldu, he went home to Amsterdam for four months, immersed in Balzac's Seraphita, and first read through the Credo while listening to Bach's Mass in B Minor.

Nabi gatherings at Ranson's studio continued, but he soon returned to Saint-Nolff, armed with a Bible, a Catechism, Edouard Schuré's Les Grands Initiés[11] (at Sérusier's recommendation) and the Confessions of St Augustine.

Adjusting to Benedictine customs, Verkade was transported by the Gregorian music of the Mass, and deeply impressed by the evolution of the Beuron artwork, which was diverging from modern art, the volumes being increasingly subordinated to the stylistic elements of the Cornelius and Kaulbach schools.

In the Benedictine life grounded in the liturgy, at once earnest and joyful, reserved and meditative, steady and versatile, for Verkade spirit, intellect and heart all had their celebration, and all arts served their true ends.