Stylogenyin the style of Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)

Craft & organic · 1892–1914 · Western Europe

Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)

Also known as Slaoliestijl (salad-oil style), Dutch Art Nouveau, Dutch Jugendstil

The Dutch branch of Art Nouveau, seen mostly in book covers, vignettes and posters. Where Brussels and Paris let the line whip and swell, Dutch designers, from 1895 more and more on grids of triangles, built stylised plants and animals into flat, symmetrical repeats. They took Arts and Crafts ideals from England, and from the Dutch East Indies colony they took batik, which they used for covers in cotton, velvet and parchment. Jan Toorop's poster for Delftsche Slaolie (1894) gave the style its mocking nickname, the 'salad-oil style'.

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Two mirrored, long-legged blue birds stand among curling green foliage and burgundy and ochre flowers on a cream background. A large brown heading reading “BLOEITIJD” sits near the top, with repeating floral borders down both sides.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

Nieuwe Kunst took batik and the look of wayang shadow puppets from Java under Dutch colonial rule, largely without naming Javanese makers; when you borrow its batik surfaces or puppet-like figures, credit batik as an Indonesian craft (UNESCO-listed since 2009) whose motifs can carry meaning, and do not present printed batik-look as wax-resist work.

01

How it works

  • Construct the ornament before you draw it: lay down a grid of 45- and 60-degree triangles first, then fit the stylised plant, bird or animal into it, rhythm before motif, as J. H. and J. M. de Groot taught in Driehoeken bij ontwerpen van ornament (1896).
  • Keep every surface flat: no shading, perspective or modelling; mirror the motif about a central axis and repeat it strictly, so that a cover, endpaper or vignette reads as one flat, symmetrical pattern.
  • Treat the page and the cover as a surface to be filled with decoration, and draw the title and author's name by hand into that field as one more element of the pattern.
  • Make covers with the batik technique itself: wax-resist dyed cotton or parchment, one design issued in several colourways with a luxury version on velvet, as Lebeau did for De stille kracht, often dividing the field into bays with fine double lines.
  • Keep colour to a few muted, flat tones, such as indigo and blue, brown, ochre and olive, on a cream or parchment ground, with gold lines for accents; never grade or model it.
  • On a poster, fill most of the sheet with long, wavy parallel lines of hair and drapery around elongated silhouettes like Javanese shadow puppets, as Toorop did for Delftsche Slaolie.

Amsterdam and The Hague: book covers for publishers such as Scheltema & Holkema (Amsterdam) and L. J. Veen, posters, and the craft shop 't Binnenhuis (Amsterdam, 1900), drawing on the English Arts and Crafts movement and on batik from the Dutch East Indies colony (now Indonesia)

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Illusion of depth, Generous white space, Naturalistic depiction, Gradients, Pastel, Fluorescent & neon, Dynamic asymmetry, Grotesque & neo-grotesque, Eclectic mixing, Ornament-free, Straight photography

Palette

  • #ede2c6
  • #6e4426
  • #23365a
  • #c49a3a
  • #6b7340
  • #5a2f45

Typefaces

  • Hand-drawn titles lettered into the decoration of covers and posters, such as Theo Nieuwenhuis's lettering, recognisable enough that Leiden University Libraries attribute a 1908 parchment binding to him on the strength of its typography

  • Klaas van Leeuwen, Letterboek voor den teekenaar en ambachtsman (1907), a lettering model book, geometric in concept, from the theosophical circle of De Bazel and Lauweriks

  • Hollandsche Mediaeval (S. H. de Roos, Lettergieterij Amsterdam, 1912), the first new printing type by a Dutch designer in some 150 years; Braches treats De Roos among the Nieuwe Kunst book designers

Known for

  • Jan Toorop, poster for Delftsche Slaolie, commissioned by the Nederlandsche Oliefabriek in Delft, 1894

    a colour lithograph (95 × 62.5 cm) in which two women with wavy hair and billowing draperies fill most of the sheet, in a linear style whose strong silhouettes, in the Wolfsonian's words, 'evoke Javanese shadow puppets'; it gave Dutch Art Nouveau its nickname, the 'salad-oil style' (Rijksmuseum RP-P-1912-2395; the Wolfsonian dates its copy 1895)

  • Chris Lebeau, covers for Louis Couperus, De stille kracht (L. J. Veen, 1900), a novel set in the Dutch East Indies

    batik cotton covers in several colour variants and a luxury version on velvet, both named by the Wolfsonian, which credits Agathe Wegerif alongside Lebeau; CODART credits the batik binding with making the medium popular in the Netherlands

  • G. W. Dijsselhof, binding and vignettes for Kunst en samenleving

    Jan Veth's Dutch translation of Walter Crane's The Claims of Decorative Art (Scheltema & Holkema, 1893); his design for the cover of the stitched edition stretches three peacock feathers horizontally across front and back (Rijksmuseum RP-P-1993-21). CODART calls the book one of the masterpieces of Nieuwe Kunst

  • Theo Nieuwenhuis, decoration and typography of Lodewijk van Deyssel, Verzamelde opstellen (Scheltema & Holkema, Amsterdam, 1894–1907), in a five-volume set bound by Jan Mensing (Leiden University Libraries, Nieuwe Kunst collection)

  • C. A. Lion Cachet, batik cover for Rembrandt

    26 photogravures (1901); the Wolfsonian names him as the first to experiment with batik, first on textiles and later on parchment

  • H. P. Berlage, poster Harwich – Hoek van Holland, New Short Route June 1st 1893

    a symmetrical composition with geometric and stylised motifs, city views of London and Amsterdam, the route and a timetable (Rijksmuseum RP-P-1913-472; Wolfsonian)

  • J. L. M. Lauweriks, cover of Theosophia, the periodical of the Dutch Theosophical Society (1896), with the Society's emblem rising from a lotus at the centre of the composition (Wolfsonian)

  • Emilie van Kerckhoff, batiked parchment portfolio for 't Binnenhuis, c. 1910, divided into bays by double gold lines and filled with floral motifs in light and dark blue (Leiden University Libraries)

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Nieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleNieuwe Kunst (Dutch Art Nouveau)1892–1914 · Western Europe

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Sources

  1. Rijksmuseum, Jan Toorop, Poster for Delft Salad Oil, 1894, RP-P-1912-2395 (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-1912-2395)
  2. Rijksmuseum, G. W. Dijsselhof, design for the cover of the stitched edition of 'Kunst en samenleving', 1893, RP-P-1993-21 (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-1993-21)
  3. Rijksmuseum, H. P. Berlage, Harwich – Hoek van Holland, New Short Route June 1st 1893, RP-P-1913-472 (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-P-1913-472)
  4. The Wolfsonian–FIU, 'Experience the breathtaking design of the Nieuwe Kunst [New Art]', Google Arts & Culture, including its captions on Toorop's Delftsche Slaolie ('a linear style and strong silhouettes to evoke Javanese shadow puppets') and Lebeau's De stille kracht ('a luxury version on velvet') (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/3gUx3EZgJHkqLA)
  5. CODART, on the exhibition Golden Age: Highlights of Dutch Graphic Design (1890–1990), Museum De Beyerd, Breda, 2007–08 (https://www.codart.nl/?p=1515)
  6. Kasper van Ommen, 'Friends of Leiden University Libraries generously support acquisitions for the Nieuwe Kunst collection', Leiden Special Collections Blog, 25 June 2020 (https://leidenspecialcollectionsblog.nl/articles/friends-of-leiden-university-libraries-generously-support-acquisitions-for-the-nieuwe-kunst-collection)
  7. Ernst Braches, Het boek als Nieuwe Kunst, 1892–1903: een studie in Art Nouveau (Oosthoek, Utrecht, 1973), chapter 'Aanvaarding van het wiskundig beginsel: 1895', via DBNL (https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/brac001boek01_01/brac001boek01_01_0010.php); English edition: Dutch Art Nouveau and Book Design, 1892–1903 (2009)
  8. Mathieu Lommen, 'Theosophy and Lettering: Klaas van Leeuwen's Letterboek voor den teekenaar en ambachtsman, 1907', Quaerendo 55:2 (2025), pp. 141–158 (https://www.dare.uva.nl/id/dad61a0f-253a-4f28-80f7-de7a85092fc1)
  9. Buitenkunst Den Haag (City of The Hague), 'Gedenkteken Theo van Hoytema', on his animal drawings, picture books from 1891 and calendars (https://bkdh.nl/en/kunstwerken/gedenkteken-theo-van-hoytema/)
  10. Wikipedia (nl), 'Jugendstil', reached via 'Nieuwe Kunst' (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieuwe_Kunst)
  11. Wikipedia (nl), 'Chris Lebeau' (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lebeau)
  12. Wikipedia (nl), 'Theo van Hoytema' (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Hoytema)
  13. Wikipedia (nl), 'Sjoerd Hendrik de Roos' (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sjoerd_Hendrik_de_Roos)

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