Reinier Vinkeles (Amsterdam, June 19, 1741 – Amsterdam, January 30, 1816) was a Dutch draftsman, illustrator and engraver.
Vinkeles started as an apprentice at Jan Punt. He joined the Amsterdam City Drawing Academy in 1762 and became one of its directors in 1765. Another director was the architect Jacob Otten Husly. In the same year he traveled to Brabant with Jurriaen Andriessen and Izaak Schmidt.
In 1770 Vinkeles left for Paris, where he studied with Jacques-Philippe Le Bas and met the Dutch artists Hermanus Numan and Izaak de Wit. A year later, Vinkeles returned permanently to Amsterdam and began producing countless stage and book illustrations, historical prints, topographical scenes, portrait engravings, painting reproductions, and so on. That same year he was invited by Catherine the Great of Russia to become director of the Saint Petersburg Art Academy, but declined.
Vinkeles' style was quite baroque in the beginning, later it tended towards classicism and then became more natural again. His enormous productivity - Vinkeles' oeuvre is estimated at around 2,500 prints - sometimes led to superficiality, but his best work (especially his earlier ones) is highly regarded.
His later work for publications such as Kok's Vaderlandsch Dictionary, the Vervolg van Wagenaar and other such works, as well as his many cityscapes and landscapes, are also of historical importance. His work can be found in the collection of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, among others.
