André Lynen

André-Victor Lynen was born in Antwerp in 1888, a distant nephew of the Brussels painter and illustrator Amédée Lynen. He trained in the Antwerp and Brussels academies and made the sea his life’s subject: the harbours, fishing fleets and dunes of Nieuwpoort and Ostend, where he lived and worked for most of his life, and the ports of the Mediterranean and the North on his travels.

A regular of the Brussels Salon, he exhibited in Luxembourg in 1928 and Copenhagen in 1931, and in 1933 founded the Royal Society of Belgian Marine Painters, whose annual exhibition he organised at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

Lynen painted in a vigorous late-Impressionist manner, often on small panels in thick, ridged strokes that catch the light of the coast. Boats at anchor, steamers entering harbour, winter landscapes and stormy seas make up the bulk of his work, which he also produced in watercolour.

He is represented in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, in the Mu.ZEE in Ostend — which devoted an exhibition to him — and in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims. He died in Brussels in 1984 at the age of ninety-five.