Nicolaes Muys

Nicolaes Muys spent nearly all his life in Rotterdam. He was baptised there in 1740 and died there in 1808, in his house on the Glashaven, one of the city's harbours. Art ran in the family. His father was a painter, his sister Cornelia painted as well, and his younger brother Robert became an engraver.

In 1762 Muys was studying at the drawing academy in The Hague under Aert Schouman, a painter best known for his birds. Back in Rotterdam he took the work a painter in a merchant city could get, portraits and landscapes, copies after older pictures, and in 1774 scenery for the city theatre. He also rose to the top of the local art world, as a senior officer of the painters' guild from 1792 and, from 1802, chairman of Hierdoor tot Hooger, the Rotterdam drawing society he had joined in 1783.