This autobiography follows the story of an artist's journey from Anabaptist Holland to the cloisters of a Catholic monastery in Germany. As Verkade seeks meaning and coherence amidst his religious and artistic conundrums, he travels to the Paris of avant-garde artists in the 1890s, where he meets Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis. A sojourn in Brittany with a friend, painting the countryside, leads to Jan's first experience of the Catholic Mass.
Received into the Catholic Church, Verkade embarks on a spiritual and aesthetic journey that leads him to Rome, Florence, and Assisi before discovering the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron in Germany and the unique artistic style championed by one of their monks. Stunned by the beauty of the Benedictine life he found at Beuron, Verkade decides his true vocation is to be an "artist-monk."
The monastic artistic movement of Beuron aimed at a renewal of sacred art, inspired by and forming a synthesis of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and early Christian art. These memoirs of an ambassador of Beuronese art across Europe (along with their sequel In Quest of Beauty) were translated into numerous languages.
A religious and cultural tale that sprawls across Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Yesterdays of an Artist-Monk draws the reader into Old-World Europe, the adventures of a singularly talented young Dutchman, and his discovery of the Catholic Church.