R. (RAOUL) HYNCKES

Biography

R. (RAOUL) HYNCKES
1893 Brussel (Belgium) - 1973 Blaricum (The Netherlands)

Raoul Hynckes (Brussels 1893: Blaricum 1973) was a Belgian painter who spent almost his entire career in the Netherlands. Trained at the academies of Brussels and Mechelen, he began as an Impressionist, painting Flemish landscapes and harbour and river views. At the outbreak of the First World War, he fled to the neutral Netherlands in 1914. A prolonged artistic crisis led him in 1924 to break with his early work and largely destroy it, followed first by a Cubist phase. From around 1933, he developed the style for which he is best known: meticulously detailed, almost photographic still lifes of a vanitas character, in which withered branches, skulls, and old objects are theatrically lit against a deep, dark ground. Together with Carel Willink and Pyke Koch, he is regarded as one of the principal exponents of Dutch Magic Realism. After 1950, his work grew sparer, lighter in tone and more monochrome, with a renewed interest in landscape and village scenes. He died in 1973, almost eighty years old.