View of a Town on a River

1645

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 131 cm × width 165.3 cm
outer size: depth 8.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, bottom centre on a boat: I. V Goyen 1645

Technical notes

The support consists of two strips of plain-weave canvas, and has been lined. There is a horizontal seam in the middle. Cusping is present along the left, right and bottom edges, and there is slight cusping along the top edge. All the tacking edges are present. The ground is light-coloured, probably grey, and it shows traces of the ferrule of the brush. The paint was applied transparently, in a loose and fluent manner, with clearly visible brush marks. The outlines of the figures were sketched with a small brush, and colored in afterwards. The boats near the bank were painted on top of the background. The chimney to the right of the large tree was originally shorter.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 7 April 2003

Condition

Fair. The paint is considerably abraded and there are small losses, especially in the sky. The retouchings along the seam and the varnish have discoloured.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1965: complete restoration; canvas lined

Provenance

...; sale, Heinsius, Rotterdam (D. Vis), 26 June 1793, no. 1 (‘Een Rivier- en Landgezicht; ter regterzyde van dit stuk ziet men, booven eenige Boerenwooningen, een Dorps Kerktoren, in het midden hoog Geboomte en een afrydende Postwagen, ter linkerzyde over de Rivier een aangenaam Verschiet, verder gestoffeert met werkende Beelden, zeilende en andere Vaartuigen; [...], op Doek, hoog 50 breed 63 duimen [130.5 x 164.5 cm]’), fl. 80, to N. Muys for Gerrit van der Pot (1732-1807), Lord of Groeneveld, Rotterdam;¹ his sale, Rotterdam (Gebr. van Ryp), 6 (8) June 1808 sqq., no. 44 (‘Een aangenaam Rivier- en Landgezigt. [...] Hoog 491/4, en breed 621/2 duim [128.5 x 163 cm] Dk.’), fl. 160, to Stratenus, for the museum²

Object number: SK-A-120

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

One frequently recurring theme in Van Goyen’s river scenes of the 1640s is that of the waterside inn, invariably combined with a group of travellers with horses and one or more carts.³ His oeuvre has this motif in common with that of the Haarlem artist Salomon van Ruysdael, who produced variations on this theme from the mid-1630s and whose development has numerous parallels with Van Goyen’s.⁴ The size, composition and style of the Rijksmuseum painting are reminiscent of Van Ruysdael’s Halt at the Inn dated 1644, now in Adelaide.⁵

On the signboard outside the inn is a swan, but that is no help in identifying this particular location, for there were countless inns with the word ‘swan’ in their names, and the swan was one of the commonest devices on the signboards of taverns and inns.⁶ The village on the right behind the inn was at one time identified as Overschie, near Rotterdam, because of the similarity to a sketch by Van Goyen with the inscription ‘Oudeschie’.⁷ However, the pointed spire of the church in the drawing and the painting differs from that of the Grote Kerk in Overschie, so that identification had already been rejected by Beck.⁸ Comparison with similar landscapes suggests that the artist put this village together himself, as he did on more than one occasion.⁹

This river view, executed predominantly in shades of brown and green, and criticized by the 19th-century art critic Théophile Thoré as being ‘grand, vrais, mais pastrès-heureux’,¹⁰ is among Van Goyen’s larger works, which were painted chiefly in the period 1641-44.¹¹

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. 97.

Literature

Hofstede de Groot 1923, p. 121, no. 498; Dobrzycka 1966, p. 109, no. 153; Beck II, 1973, p. 240, no. 512, with earlier literature

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 24, no. 97; 1843, p. 22, no. 98 (‘in good condition’); 1853, p. 11, no. 88 (fl. 600); 1858, p. 47, no. 96; 1876, p. 64, no. 121; 1880, pp. 107-08, no. 100; 1903, p. 107, no. 992; 1934, p. 111, no. 992; 1960, pp. 115-16, no. 992; 1976, p. 246, no. A 120; 2007, no. 97

Citation

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, View of a Town on a River, 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8561

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