(1823–after 1888)
Arnoud Wydeveld was born in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He immigrated to the United States in 1853, where he was based in New York. He returned to Nijmegen from 1864 to 1866. He painted genre scenes, and is best known for his still lifes of fruit, flowers, and fish.
Like Severin Roesen, another European immigrant working in New York during the 1850s, Wydeveld was influenced by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch still-life painting, likely filtered through contemporary European styles. One of his flower paintings, however, includes a hummingbird and an amaryllis in a natural setting, suggesting that Wydeveld was also receptive to the format and subject matter of American artists like Martin Johnson Heade.
Unlike Roesen, whose compositions usually group together a large number of small objects, Wydeveld tended to balance a smaller number of larger forms in his paintings. While Roesen worked within a fairly narrow range of subject matter, Wydeveld began his American career as a genre painter and painted many still-life subjects, including fruit, flowers, fish, and vegetables. He also displayed his subjects in a variety of formats: fruit and flowers appear both on tabletops and in natural settings, and fish are portrayed swimming in the water, leaping after a fisherman’s fly, or dead on a riverbank.
