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Piet van Wijngaerdt from Amsterdam was educated at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (1892-1897), where he was taught by Nicolaas van der Waay and Carel Dake. At that time, education at the academy was still solid and traditional. From 1899, the family moved to the Helmersbuurt, where Piet, then 26 years old, would continue to live with his parents for another 27 years. The family bond was close, especially with his mother and sister. It was not until six months after his mother's death that Piet, still unmarried, would move out on his own in the same neighborhood. After only a month on his own, he married Christina Wellensiek, who lived a few streets away. Together they moved into a house, also in the Helmersbuurt. From 1908, Van Wijngaerdt rented a studio on the Overtoom where he worked, but also received students.
In 1901, he moved to Paris, curious about the artistic climate there in all its new forms and colours, but is back in the Netherlands after a few months. With his traditional attitude, Van Wijngaerdt finds the work of the French post-impressionists disappointing. He considers ‘their work and methods decidedly ugly and quickly removes himself from the mood and artistic atmosphere of these analysers of impressions’. (F.M. Huebner: Van Wijngaerdt ) Until around 1909, Van Wijngaerdt would follow his own path in the footsteps of the Hague School – the seascapes and cloud formations, dunes and beaches with fishing boats and polder landscapes with cows. At that time, there was hardly any attention for the work of modern painters. In those years, his working area was in the immediate vicinity of Amsterdam and he painted the polder landscape with ditches, reed beds and boats along the banks on a small scale at the Overtoomse Sluis and the Jaagpad along the Schinkel. In 1910, Van Wijngaerdt took part in an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum and exhibited landscapes with titles such as ‘Aan den Plas, Onweerssfeer and Schuitje in het riet’. The same exhibition also features paintings by luminists that must have impressed Van Wijngaerdt and made him realise that he had missed ‘something’. The following year he broke with the impressionism of the Hague School and embarked on the path that his colleagues Leo Gestel, Dirk Filarski and Jan Sluijters had already taken. This is visible in Van Wijngaerdt’s work in his use of colour and the contrast of light and dark. His themes are multifaceted; he paints floral still lifes, peasant genres, figure representations, interiors, landscapes, nudes, portraits, cityscapes and self-portraits.
In 1913, the Hollandsche Kunstenaarskring was founded – a new generation of artists who opposed the tradition of the Hague School – and Van Wijngaerdt’s breakthrough became a fact. In addition to Van Wijngaerdt, Leo Gestel, Kees Maks, H.J. Wolter, Charley Toorop, Piet v.d. Hem, Piet Mondriaan and Charley Toorop were members of the circle. At that time, Van Wijngaerdt came into contact with the French painter Henri Le Fauconnier, who had fled to the Netherlands at the end of 1914 because of the First World War. Le Fauconnier wrote the manifesto 'La sensibilité moderne et le tableau'. Van Wijngaerdt was very impressed and recognized many of his own ideas about painting. When Le Fauconnier settled in Amsterdam in 1916, they founded the artists' association 'Het Signaal' and Van Wijngaerdt published his ideas about innovation in art in the magazine 'Het Signaal'. At that time, Van Wijngaardt's painting style also changed. We see a completely unique style emerge with dark and bright color contrasts in large areas that appear on the canvas in the right proportions, but without lines. With this new form of figurative, dark expressionism, Le Fauconnier and Van Wijngaerdt laid the theoretical foundation for the Bergen School, which was widely followed. The group was joined by among others Charley Toorop, Leo Gestel, Arnout Colnot, Dirk Filarski, Kees Maks, Jan Sluijters, Wim Schuhmacher, Germ de Jong and Harry Kuyten. Van Wijngaerdt himself remains an Amsterdam artist although he did indeed live in Bergen and also painted there.
Van Wijngaerdt was loved early on by collectors such as J.F.S. Esser, Piet Boendermaker and J.A.C. van den Nieuwenhuysen. The eldest sister of the latter started the Museum Pension on the corner of P.C. Hooftstraat and Stadhouderskade in 1913 with her husband Henry Werners. Van Wijngaerdt provided a small painting in each room, with the room number on the back. He was most successful in the 1920s and 1930s, when he regularly exhibited in museums, including three times in the Stedelijk Museum (1918, 1924 and 1935), the Mak art gallery on the Rokin and the Lakenhal in Leiden. In 1954, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam organized a final exhibition on the occasion of his 80th birthday. From 1941 until his death, Van Wijngaerdt lived in Abcoude, where he remained active until the end of his life.
