NEUFCHATEL, Nicolas
Flemish painter and draughtsman, active in Germany. He was one of the leading portrait painters in Germany in the 1560s, and it is likely that he was the ‘Colyn van Nieucasteel’ listed in the archives of Antwerp’s Guild of St Luke in 1539 as a pupil of Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Although his teacher was not a portrait painter, in Antwerp Neufchatel was exposed to the art of Frans Floris, the young Willem Key and the Master of the 1540s, whose work has been postulated as Neufchatel’s juvenilia. Joachim von Sandrart, writing in 1675, thought that Neufchatel trained and worked in Mons c. 1540.
Between 1561 and 1567 he was documented as living in Nuremberg, the last secure reference occurring on 23 July 1567, when the city council, angered by a disturbance near the church of St Egidius, ordered him not to engage in any further Calvinist agitation. This episode suggests that Neufchatel, like so many of his countrymen, had moved to Germany for religious reasons. He seems to have remained in Nuremberg at least until 1573, the date on his portrait of Johann Gregor van der Schardt (Trieste, Museo Storico Castello di Miramare), after which there is no further trace of him. Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, in his Historische Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Mathematicis und Künstlern (Nuremberg, 1730), mistakenly offered 1597 as Neufchatel’s death date.
