MOLYN, Pieter de
(b. 1595, London, d. 1661, Haarlem)

Biography

Dutch landscape painter, active mainly in Haarlem. With Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael, also active in Haarlem, he ranks as one of the pioneers of naturalistic landscape painting in Holland. It is not known if these three painters worked together, if they arrived at similar solutions independently, or if one of them began experiments with monochromatic pictures of dunes and cottages and the others followed his lead. Molyn's later career was less distinguished, and he seems then to have worked more as a draughtsman then a painter. He also etched.