Showrooms exhibition. Fresh take on Jakob Smits
Until 29 September 2024, the Showrooms exhibition will be running at the former vicarage and now newly restored Jakob Smits Museum in Mol-Sluis. Fresh take on Jakob Smits. In eight rooms, museum have grafted their own tastes and preferences onto each specific theme from the painter's life.
Jakob Smits was born in Rotterdam in 1855, the son of a decorator. Following academic studies in Rotterdam, Brussels, Munich, Vienna and Rome, he gave up decorating and settled in 1888 in Mol, in the hamlet of Achterbos. There, he married his second wife, Malvina. From 1897, he won gold medals for his watercolours. He also painted a great many portraits. Malvina died in 1899; in 1901, he married for the third time and had his first individual exhibition. Financially, he began to fare better. During World War I, he devoted himself primarily to social work. The last years of his life were artistically the most fruitful, as a painter and etcher. Jakob Smits died in 1928.
Between roughly 1880 and 1914, a large group of realistic or impressionist painters from home and abroad came to Mol and the surrounding area to paint the Campine landscapes and interiors, known as the Mol School. Symbolist and pre-expressionist Smits was in close contact with many among them. His work hangs in Mol, Ostend, Bruges, Deurle, Antwerp, Charleroi, Rotterdam and Paris.
And don't forget to have a look at his residence studio in Mol-Achterbos, no. 126.