NICKELEN, Isaak van
Dutch painter of church interiors. There is little surviving information about his life. He was a businessman as well as an artist, and had interests in silk trading and glass manufacturing. Based on a not in an auction catalogue of 1711, stating that he had painted figures in an interior by Pieter Jansz Saenredam, and on the fact that his paintings are strongly influenced by the older master, it was presumed that he was Saenredam’s pupil. There is, however, no documentary evidence in support of this hypothesis.
He joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke in 1660. All known and dated church interiors by Van Nickelen depict Saint Bavo’s Church in Haarlem and all but one were painted in the 1690s. It is not known what kind of painting he produced during the thirty-year period between the two dates.
His son, Jan van Nickelen (1656-1721) was a landscape painter.
