(b Brussels, 11 May 1893; d Blaricum, 24 Jan 1973). Dutch painter. He trained at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Brussels and the Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Mechelen (1907–12). He came to the Netherlands as a Belgian war victim in 1914. Until 1924 he produced impressionistic work, depicting ports and ships in the vicinity of Volendam, but from then until 1933 he painted cubistic still-lifes. In 1933 he had his first one-man exhibition at the art dealer van Lier in Amsterdam with precisely painted realistic still-lifes of dead game and fowl. From 1933 his work breathed an atmosphere of death and decay. With such artists as Albert Carel Willink and Pyke Koch he was classified as a Magic Realist. Hynckes employed countless mortality symbols in his work; sometimes these were religious, as in The Sponge of Bitterness (1934; The Hague, Gemeentemus.). More often, however, he used secular symbols such as skulls, bones or broken chains, as in Ex est (1940). His work clearly demonstrates the influence of 16th- and 17th-century vanitas painting, as in The Keys of the Anchoret (1942–3; Utrecht, Cent. Mus.). After 1945 he produced still-lifes which no longer featured mortality symbols.

• Hynckes, Raoul
  • Netherlands, the, §III, 7(i): Painting, video film and photography, after c 1900