Design and Art Australia Online

portrait painter, was a native of Belgium and a former student of the Antwerp Academy. Listed in Waugh and Cox’s Sydney Directory in 1855, he had been working in Sydney before February 1854 when the Illustrated Sydney News published a portrait of the merchant Thomas Sutcliffe Mort of Greenoaks, Darling Point after his (completed) oil painting. In June Bell’s Life referred to 'a couple of gents, who inhabit the altitudes (we would not like to say attics) of Mort’s auction rooms in Pitt Street – Conrad Martens and Pierre Nuyts’. Another friend was the painter John Rae .

After Nuyts painted a portrait of Conrad Martens (possibly in the Mitchell Library [ML]), Martens wrote to his brother: 'there are various opinions about the likeness; some say it is very good but Mrs Martens prefers … [a colourotype] which I have done with the intention of sending you’. Many Sydney citizens clearly preferred Nuyts, who seems rapidly to have attained a local reputation as a portraitist. His 'faithful rendering of complexions’ was praised in May 1854 and on 25 January 1855 'A Lover of Art’ wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald objecting that the commission for a portrait of Governor Sir Charles FitzRoy had been given to an English painter, stating: 'Visits to the studio of M. Nuits [sic], Mr Smith [ H.R. Smith ] and other eminent artists who have made Sydney their abiding-place, must convince judges of high art that to send such a commission of the kind to London – a commission which involves sentiments essentially Australian – is a gratuitous insult to eminent artists of whose presence amongst us, Sydney ought to be proud.’

Two days later the Herald was praising Nuyts’s half-length, life-size portrait of Bishop W.G. Broughton which Sophia Campbell 's son John had commissioned for St Philip’s Church of England Grammar School, Sydney. This oil painting (now at The King’s School) seems heavy and stilted today but was then thought to evince 'that elevation of thought which distinguishes the true artist’, 'a largeness and liberality of style which subordinates mere consideration of technicality’. His oil portrait of Robert Campbell was praised in much the same terms.

An unsigned and undated naive watercolour, Camp Hill, Young, at Time of the Riot (ML), probably painted at the time of the anti-Chinese riots of 1860-61, has been attributed to Nuyts despite an inscription which states that it was by Mrs C. Moley Clark . The attribution is particularly unconvincing because Martens wrote that Nuyts left New South Wales for Batavia (Java) in 1856.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011