NUYEN, Wijnandus Johannes Josephus - b. 1813 Den Haag, d. 1839 Den Haag

Dutch painter and printmaker. The son of a baker, he was apprenticed at the age of 12 to Andreas Schelfhout in The Hague, and from 1825 to 1829 he went to the Hague Tekenacademie, under the direction of Bartholomeus J. van Hove. With remarkable rapidity Nuyen grew into a highly productive painter of landscapes, marines and townscapes; his favourite themes were the Normandy and northern French coasts. In 1829 he was awarded a medal by the Felix Meritis society in Amsterdam for a watercolour of a forest landscape (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). After completing his training he made several trips to Belgium, France and Germany, sometimes in the company of A. Waldorp (1803-66). In 1836 he was admitted to the Koninklijke Akademie in Amsterdam, and one year before his death he married Schelfhout’s daughter.

River Landscape with Ruins

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek and Wijnandus Johannes Josephus Nuyen combined Romantic landscape with a revival of the Dutch seventeenth-century style, in particular the dramatic mood painting of Jacob van Ruisdael and Allaert van Everdingen.

When he was twenty, Nuyen travelled to France. There he met artists who painted in the Romantic manner, with strong contrasts of light and shade, intense colours and a sense of drama. Nuyen became fascinated with this style of painting and soon emerged as Holland’s leading Romantic artist. This painting is a good example of his work, with a ruined castle, a dead tree blown down by the wind, clouds scudding across the sky, and shadows darkening the landscape. Nuyen’s work was innovative and exuberant by Dutch standards.