Object data
oil on panel
support: height 31.3 cm × width 44.6 cm
outer size: depth 4.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Jan van Goyen
Panoramic View of a River with Low-Lying Meadows
in or after 1644
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower left (falsely?): VG 1641
Technical notes
The support is a single oak panel with a horizontal grain that is bevelled on all sides, the bevels varying from 2-4.5 cm in width. The paint of the ground layer is visible on and overall the edges, indicating that the support has retained its original dimensions. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1633. The panel could have been ready for use by 1644, but a date in or after 1650 is more likely. No underdrawing was found with infrared reflectography. Pigment analysis revealed that the ground is composed of two layers. The first consists of chalk, and the second layer of chalk, lead white, earth colours and black, which was applied very thinly. The paint layers consist of lead white, earth colours, black and colourless smalt. The paint was applied fluently and wet in wet, transparently in the hill and the farm in the foreground, and more opaquely in the sky and the background. Brushstrokes are visible in the sky. The palette is sober, consisting mainly of green, brown, yellow and grey tones.
Scientific examination and reports
- X-radiography: RMA, no. 50, 1948
- dendrochronology: J. Bauch, 15 November 1971
- paint samples: G. Tauber, RMA, 16 February 1995
- X-radiography: RMA, nos. 1675a-b, 14 August 1995
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 26 October 1995
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 6 September 2004
Literature scientific examination and reports
unpublished entry by Ariane van Suchtelen, RMA, 1995
Condition
Good. There are small paint losses in the sky.
Conservation
- M. Kuiper, 1987: complete restoration
Provenance
...; ? sale, Robert P. Roupell (†) et al. [section Robert P. Roupell], London (Christie et al.), 25 June 1887, no. 21 (‘A Landscape, with a cottage and peasants in the foreground, boats on a river, and a windmill in the distance. Signed, and dated 1641.12 3/4 in. x 17 1/2 in.’ [32.5 x 44.5 cm.]), £ 57 15s to Colnaghi;1...; purchased by the Fürst von Liechtenstein, Vienna, from the dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris, 1890;2 given in exchange to the dealer H.O. Miethke, Vienna, 1894;3...; from T. Humphry Ward (1845-1926), London, fl. 4,820, to the museum, through the mediation of the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1903
Object number: SK-A-2133
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
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
In addition to many panoramas with a town in the distance, Van Goyen painted several extensive views in the first half of the 1640s in which buildings play only a minor role.4 In this river landscape the horizon is exceptionally low, even for Van Goyen, with the sky taking up almost four-fifths of the picture surface. The rigid planar structure is broken by a repoussoir in the form of two figures on a mound with a young tree and a few bushes. Van Goyen generally used such foreground motifs in the early 1640s.5
The date on this painting has caused a certain amount of confusion. It was read as 1641 in the 1903 catalogue of the Van Goyen exhibition and in other important publications, which is fully in line with Van Goyen’s stylistic development towards landscapes with fewer and fewer repoussoirs. However, dendrochronological examination in 1971 and again in 1995 showed that the tree from which the panel came could not have been felled before 1642.6
One possibility is that the date was simply read incorrectly, as so often happens with Van Goyen;7 another is that some of the digits are abraded. On the evidence of an infrared photograph taken in 1987 it was suggested that the final digit may originally have been a 5.8 That infrared reflectogram is not very convincing though, and there seems to have been some wishful thinking involved when it was interpreted.
It is also possible that the signature and date are not autograph, but examination under the stereo microscope did not provide any firm evidence of that. It is true that the signature was added after the paint had dried, and in a colour not found anywhere else in the painting, but there are other instances of that in Van Goyen’s oeuvre.9 All the same, there is cause for doubt, particularly because of the somewhat angular shape of the rather upright letters and numbers.10 Taking everything into account, a date of 1644 or shortly afterwards seems plausible. This places the picture in the same period as Van Goyen’s panoramic views in the vicinity of Haarlem (SK-A-3249 and SK-A-4044). which makes the artist’s development less linear than was thought.
In 1890 this painting was in Paris with the art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, who played an important part in reestablishing Van Goyen’s reputation with his 1873 exhibition on the artist in Vienna, and with the large number of Van Goyens he had from the 1870s on.11
A mirror-image version of this work that Beck calls a copy is not a copy but a compositionally related landscape that was probably executed by a follower of Van Goyen.12
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. 96.
Literature
Hofstede de Groot 1923, p. 121, no. 497; Dobrzycka 1966, pp. 43, 100, no. 94; Beck II, 1973, p. 437, no. 972, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 107, no. 989a; 1934, p. 110, no. 989a; 1960, p. 115, no. 991 A 1; 1976, p. 246, no. A 2133; 2007, no. 96
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Panoramic View of a River with Low-Lying Meadows, in or after 1644', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8565
(accessed 25 November 2024 00:52:39).