Simon Moulijn

Simon Moulijn made his name in a medium most painters treated as an afterthought. Born in Rotterdam in 1866 to a merchant family that doubted the whole idea of art school, he trained at the academies of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, where he fell in with a rising generation, among them the painter Isaac Israëls and the designer Richard Roland Holst.

What set him apart was the lithograph, a print pulled from a drawing on stone. He pushed its soft greys and velvety blacks toward mood, filling misty, silent landscapes with a stillness that led critics to call him the painter of romantic loneliness. In 1903 he built a house of his own design near the artists' village of Laren, and later taught for 15 years at the Rotterdam academy where he had started. His prints are kept today in the Rijksprentenkabinet, the national print room in Amsterdam.