Artist

(b. 1702, Antwerpen, d. 1748, London)

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Details

Flemish painter, active in England. He first studied under his father, Jan Baptiste Nollekens, and later worked with him in France, where he learnt to make imitations of Antoine Watteau's fêtes galantes; during his first visit to England, after 1718, he studied under the landscape painter Peter Tillemans. Nollekens's early works are mostly rather pedestrian imitations of Watteau's works, sometimes with picturesque Roman ruins added in the manner of Giovanni Paolo Pannini. There was a ready market for such works in England, and the demand for decorative pieces of this kind must have encouraged him to settle there. After his arrival in London in 1733, he extended his repertory to include conversation pieces; examples of his work in this vein include a Family Group (1740; Yale Center of British Art, New Haven) and the convincingly English if awkwardly painted Conversation in an Interior (1740; Fairfax House, York). He also painted genre scenes of children, for example Two Children Building a House of Cards and Two Boys Playing with Tops (both 1745; Yale Center of British Art, New Haven), which derive from similar works by Jean-Siméon Chardin and Philip Mercier. His patrons included Richard Child, 1st Earl of Tilney, who owned Wanstead House, Essex (destroyed), from where 16 pictures by Nollekens were sold in 1822, and Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, for whom he decorated with bacchanals (destroyed) the two lake pavilions built c. 1717 by John Vanbrugh in the gardens of Stowe, Bucks. //

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Category	Artists
Artists by letter	N
Artist nationality	Flemish