Wijnand Nuijen, painter and etcher, developed a passionate romantic vision of the depiction of the landscape in his short life - he was 26 years old - and gave a new impulse to Dutch landscape painting.
At the age of twelve, Nuijen was apprenticed to the famous landscape painter Andreas Schelfhout in The Hague. Nuijen's father, who had a bakery, recognized his son's talent early on and gave him all the space to develop it. From 1825 to 1829 he attended the Hague Drawing Academy where he was taught by Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove. After his time at the academy, Nuijen tried to break away from the strict rules of landscape art that had been taught to him. With his friend Antoni Waldorp he made a study trip to Germany and to the northern French coast. Together they visited museums in Paris and the Paris salon where works by romantic artists such as Eugène Isabey and John Constable were on display. At the Salon, Nuijen saw for the first time paintings of wild shipwrecks, stormy coasts and dreamy Normandy harbours, painted in dramatic colour schemes and strong contrasts. He discovered the possibilities offered by romantic painting – space for fantasy, in which nature was seen as a source of deep feelings – and tried to portray this in his work. But the Dutch art critics were shocked by the violation of the solid traditions of Dutch landscape art. According to them recognisability made way for a feeling that was fake and labelled this as ‘dangerous’.
In 1833 Nuijen submitted a number of landscapes for the Hague Exhibition of Works of Art that he had made after his first trip. The criticism erupted. He was accused of increasingly deviating from the path of his famous predecessors. Instead of giving a true-to-life representation of nature, he was said to be looking for ‘effect’, he used too much fantasy and his colours were too daring. Another problem was that he was difficult to classify into a genre, unlike other painters of that time, who largely stuck to their own speciality: history painting, portrait, landscape or still life. Nuijen's paintings after 1830 were often landscape and history, or landscape and drama. Despite the criticism, Nuijen continued to search for new impulses from outside and developed his own style. He studied and collected lithographs of the work of the English and French romantics and made several trips along the Rhine in Germany and to Normandy between 1833 and 1836.
Nuijen worked feverishly during the last years of his life and married the daughter of Schelfhout, his former teacher, a year before his death. At a young age, his work was exhibited throughout the country and awarded with distinctions. When he died at the age of twenty-six, it was a blow to many young artists who had set Nuyen as an example. Nuyen's talent is undeniable; the most striking features of his work were his pronounced use of colour, the sharp contrasts and his unusual compositions. Fortunately, in addition to the criticism he received, there was also appreciation for his work; in 1836 he was appointed as a member of the Royal Academy in Amsterdam.