André Lynen: Belgium’s Painter of the Sea

A black steamer with a red funnel comes into harbour past red-roofed houses, the hills across the water fading into a pale sky, the paint in ridged, sculptural strokes that catch the light. On the back, in the painter’s hand: 3 November 1936. André Lynen (1888–1984) painted the Belgian coast for seventy years, and this panel is lot 5 of our Modern Masters: 20th Century Art sale.

Antwerp, Brussels, Nieuwpoort

André-Victor Lynen was born in Antwerp on 4 December 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.

The Royal Society of Belgian Marine Painters

In 1933 he founded the Royal Society of Belgian Marine Painters and organised its annual exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. His own manner is a vigorous late Impressionism, often on small panels done on the spot in thick strokes: boats at anchor, steamers entering harbour, winter landscapes and stormy seas, in oil and in watercolour. He died in Brussels on 29 July 1984, aged ninety-five.

Museums and market

Lynen is represented in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Mu.ZEE in Ostend, which devoted an exhibition to him, and in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims. His panels appear regularly in the Belgian and French sale rooms; the dated ones, painted on the spot, are the most attractive to collectors of marine painting. More on his artist page.

At Aurora & Athena

Steamer in the Harbour with Red-Roofed Houses, 1936, oil on board, 24.5 × 32 cm, framed, signed and dated at the lower right and dated again on the reverse, is offered on 17 October 2026 with an estimate of 400 – 600 €. Photographs, condition summary and bidding on the lot page.