Overview

This finely rendered drawing belongs to a rare and important body of preparatory studies by Etie van Rees, produced during the most productive years of her sculptural practice. Executed in delicate but assured pencil lines, the sheet reveals the artist’s sustained engagement with the visual systems of Oceania—particularly the art of the Sepik River region in present-day Papua New Guinea—and her transformation of these influences into a distinctive hybrid mythology.

The winged figure depicted here represents a crucial stage in Van Rees’s creative process: a moment when ethnographic observation merges with personal imagination to generate an entirely new form, neither human nor animal, neither mask nor deity, but a synthesis of all four.

Artistic Context

Although Van Rees never travelled to New Guinea, she was deeply exposed to the region’s material culture through the flourishing circulation of ethnographic objects in mid-twentieth-century Netherlands. Collectors, missionaries and anthropologists brought substantial holdings of Sepik carvings, masks and ritual ornaments into Dutch private hands. The artist moved within these intellectual and collecting circles, encountering artefacts that profoundly shaped her formal language.

From the 1950s onward, the idioms of Sepik art became a persistent substructure in her sculptural designs and graphic studies. She adopted, reinterpreted and abstracted characteristic features from Iatmul masks and spirit boards—elongated faces, concentric oval eyes, sharply incised beak-like noses, and symmetrical ornamental patterning—while reframing them within the European traditions of fantasy, metamorphosis and ceramic figuration.

Description and Iconography

The present drawing shows a powerful winged being approaching the viewer in an almost ceremonial frontal pose. The figure’s head is constructed like a composite mask:

• oval, spiralling eyes reminiscent of Middle Sepik shield iconography

• a vertical nasal ridge descending into a beak-like, segmented mouth

• a smooth cranial dome, possibly indicating a coiffure, helmet or ritual headdress

• a beaded breastplate, echoing Papua Gulf chest ornaments but integrated into human anatomy

The wings—broad, rhythmic, and textured with feather-like strokes—extend outward from a torso that fuses avian and mammalian anatomy. The limbs taper into bird-like claws, suggesting perpetual elevation or flight, while the torso retains a sensuous, anthropomorphic fullness.

This figure is not a direct copy of any known Sepik prototype. Instead, it should be understood as an imaginative reconstruction, a “new being” in the artist’s personal cosmology. It expresses Van Rees’s interest in liminality: the boundary between human identity and ancestral spirit, between ornament and organism, between body and architecture.

Technique and Function within the Artist’s Process

In this sheet, Van Rees’s pencil work is simultaneously exploratory and controlled:

• Rapid outlining captures the dynamic movement of wings and limbs

• Dense, controlled shading builds the mask-like head structure

• Circular, repetitive markings articulate musculature and emphasise symmetry

• Decorative patterning is carefully tested for later sculptural application

Such sheets reveal how Van Rees developed ideas before translating them into ceramic or mixed-media three-dimensional forms. These were never intended as finished drawings; instead, they function as thinking tools, bridges between the initial imaginative impulse and the final sculptural realisation.

As part of the group acquired by Mrs. E. Bredius directly from the artist, this drawing retains the intimacy of the studio environment. It provides rare access to Van Rees’s private methods, showing her in the act of invention rather than execution.

Cultural Dialogue: Oceania and the Dutch Avant-Garde

The mid-century Netherlands saw a renewed interest in non-Western art as a source of formal and spiritual renewal. For artists like Van Rees, Oceanic material culture offered:

• a structural alternative to European naturalism

• a symbolic vocabulary rooted in ancestry and transformation

• an emphasis on the mask as both identity and concealment

• a model for integrating ornament and anatomy

Rather than imitating Oceanic forms, Van Rees internalised their logic. Her creatures—like the winged figure in this drawing—embody the principles of Sepik design while occupying an entirely new imaginative domain. They stand as a dialogue between world traditions, refracted through the private mythology of a modern Dutch artist.

Provenance and Historical Significance

The drawing belonged to Mrs. E. Bredius, a collector associated with the intellectual and artistic milieu in which Van Rees moved. Importantly, the sheet carries a 1975 notation documenting that it was given by the artist herself, placing it in the category of direct studio material—an extremely rare provenance for Van Rees’s preparatory work.

For scholars, the drawing provides evidence of her hybrid sources and confirms the transmission of ethnographic inspiration into European studio practice. For collectors, it represents one of the few surviving examples of Van Rees’s graphic development of a sculptural idea.

Its place within The Weyde Collection situates it in a contemporary context where cross-cultural aesthetics, speculative figuration and the history of artist-collector relationships converge.

Study for a Sepik-Inspired Winged Figure stands as a key document of Etie van Rees’s mature creative language. Rich with intercultural resonance, sculptural intention and personal mythology, it exemplifies her capacity to absorb and transform the visual traditions of Oceania into visionary forms that transcend cultural boundaries.

Within the broader suite of drawings preserved from her studio, this sheet represents a moment of synthesis—a rare glimpse into the formative process of an artist whose work bridges continents, histories and realms of imagination.

Provenance:

Acquired directly from the artist by Mrs. E. Bredius, Aerdenhout, in 1975.

By descent to a private collection.

Now part of The Weyde Collection.