Hetty Broedelet-Henkes artwork • painting • previously for sale Primroses in a vase

Hetty Henkes is best known as a painter of flower and fruit still lifes, but at a young age she also drew and painted meritorious (children's) portraits. Her early, intimate still lifes are painted in warm tones on a dark ground, but from 1908 the background becomes lighter and the touch looser. Between 1891 and 1898 Henkes was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, where she already received an honorable mention in the 'still life drawing' department in her first year of study. At the academy she met the painter André Broedelet, whom she married in 1901. Henkes lived most of her life in The Hague, where she was a working member of Pulchri Studio since 1909.