The Valkhof in Nijmegen

1641

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 91.5 cm × width 130 cm
outer size: depth 11 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower left, on the ferry boat: V Goyen 1641

Technical notes

The support is a medium-weave canvas which has been lined. The indentation left by the strainer is only visible at the top, and the composition extends over the edges of the canvas, which might mean that the painting has been slightly reduced in size. The paint was applied fluently and rapidly with visible brush marks over a light-grey ground layer.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 18 August 2004

Condition

Fair. The sky is extensively abraded and retouched. The unevenly applied varnish has discoloured.

Conservation

W.A. Hopman, 1874: canvas lined

Provenance

...; from Mr George, The Hague, fl. 300, to the museum, 1805-06¹

Object number: SK-A-122

The artist

Jan van Goyen (Leiden 1596 - The Hague 1656)

Jan van Goyen, the son of a cobbler, was born in Leiden on 13 January 1596. According to the Leiden chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers, from 1606 onward he was a pupil successively of the Leiden painters Coenraet van Schilperoort, Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg (1537/38-1614) and Jan Adriansz de Man, a glass-painter named Clock and Willem Gerritsz in Hoorn. After spending a year in France, he trained in 1617-18 with the landscape painter Esaias van de Velde in Haarlem. Van Goyen subsequently returned to his birthplace, where he married Anna Willemsdr van Raelst on 5 August 1618. He is recorded several times in Leiden archives between 1625 and 1631. In 1632, Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he acquired citizenship two years later. In 1634, he worked for some time in Isaack van Ruisdael’s workshop in Haarlem. Van Goyen was head man of the Hague guild in 1638 and 1640. In 1651, he was commissioned to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the burgomaster’s room in the Hague Town Hall, for which he received 650 guilders. Documents reveal that throughout his life Van Goyen had speculated with little success in various businesses, including property and tulips. Van Goyen died at the age of 60 in The Hague on 27 April 1656, leaving debts of at least 18,000 guilders.

Van Goyen was among the most prolific and innovative of all 17th-century Dutch artists. He painted landscapes and seascapes, river scenes and town views. His oeuvre comprises more than 1,200 paintings and about 1,500 drawings, several hundred of which are still in the original sketchbooks. Many of his works are dated, ranging from 1620 to 1656. His early landscapes are polychrome, and closely resemble those by his teacher Esaias van de Velde. From c. 1626 he moved away from this example. With Salomon van Ruysdael, Pieter de Molijn and Jan Porcellis, he was a pioneer of the ‘tonal’ style that introduced a new standard of naturalism to landscape painting. His dune and river landscapes from the 1630s are executed in a palette of browns and greens. In the early 1640s he painted townscapes and panoramic landscapes that are dominated by a brown tonality. Around 1645, here turned to a more natural colour range. Van Goyen was a highly influential painter. He had many followers and imitators, among them Wouter Knijf, Anthonie Jansz van der Croos and Maerten Fransz van der Hulst. One of his pupils was Jan Steen (c. 1625/26-79). According to Houbraken, others were Nicolaes Berchem (1620-83) and Arent Arentsz, called Cabel (1585/86-1631).

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

References
Orlers 1641, pp. 373-74; Van Hoogstraeten 1678, p. 237; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 166-68, 170-71, II, 1719, pp. 110, 111, 235, III, 1721, p. 13; Bredius 1896 (documents); Bredius 1916; Bredius 1919; Beck I, 1972, ‘Einführung’, pp. 15-22, 29-38 (documents), pp. 39-66; Beck in Turner 1996, pp. 255-58

Entry

The Valkhof in Nijmegen is one of the most important medieval sites in the Netherlands. Emperor Frederick I, nicknamed Barbarossa (c. 1122/24-90), ordered it to be built on this particular spot because legend had it that buildings erected by Charlemagne and Julius Caesar had once stood there. The complex was demolished in 1796-97.² Jan van Goyen was the artist who introduced it as a subject in Dutch painting,³ and between 1633 and 1654 he made more than 30 paintings of this former imperial palace on the river Waal.⁴

The painting in the Rijksmuseum dates from 1641, and is executed in the restricted palette typical of Van Goyen’s work of the first half of the 1640s. The stronghold is seen from the north-west in a composition that differs little from some earlier depictions of the Valkhof from the same point of the compass, such as the one dated 1638 in Bonn.⁵ One new addition is the heavily laden ferry in the left foreground, a motif that is also found in the work of Van Goyen’s teacher, Esaias van de Velde (see SK-A-1293). Van Goyen began producing more and more views of the Valkhof in the course of the 1640s, and its rising popularity in that period may have had something to do with his monumental painting of 1641 of the same subject in the townhall in Nijmegen, which, it has been suggested, may have been commissioned by the city authorities (fig. a).⁶

There were no known preliminary studies for these paintings until a drawing surfaced a few years ago inscribed ‘Valck Hof tot nimmegen’, probably in Van Goyen’s own hand. Beck dates it to 1633 or a little earlier, and argues persuasively that this fairly detailed study was the model for all of Van Goyen’s many views of the Valkhof from the north-west.⁷

One occasionally finds minor differences in the architecture and the proportions of the buildings.⁸ For example, the number of windows in the donjon, called the Giant Tower, in the Rijksmuseum painting differs from that in the abovementioned Nijmegen painting, and the two houses to the left of the tower do not have the step gables seen in that picture.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 91.

Literature

Hofstede de Groot 1923, p. 45, no. 168; Dobrzycka 1966, p. 101, no. 103; Beck II, 1973, p. 171, no. 348, with earlier literature

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 24, no. 98; 1843, p. 22, no. 99 (‘too poor to be hung, in the attic’); 1858, p. 47, no. 97 (provenance in the catalogues from 1858-1903 erroneously taken from no. 96, SK-A-120/no. 97); 1876, p. 65, no. 123; 1880, p. 108, no. 102; 1887, p. 51, no. 407; 1903, p. 107, no. 991; 1934, p. 111, no. 991; 1960, p. 114, no. 991; 1976, p. 246, no. A 122; 2007, no. 91

Citation

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, The Valkhof in Nijmegen, 1641', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8566

(accessed 26 November 2024 23:40:04).

Figures

fig. a Jan van Goyen, *The Valkhof in Nijmegen*. Oil on canvas, 151 x 255 cm. Nijmegen, Museum Het Valkhof, on loan to the Town Hall. Photo: Peter Cox.