Object data
oil on panel
support: diameter 33.5 cm
frame: height 43.6 cm × width 44.3 cm × depth 4 cm
sight size: diameter 32 cm
Jan van Goyen
Summer
1625
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower left: I V. Goien. / 1625
Technical notes
The support is a circular oak plank with a horizontal grain that is slightly bevelled. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1607. The panel could have been ready for use by 1618, but a date in or after 1624 is more likely. The thin white ground can be seen along the edges. A pinkish imprimatura, visible in the pinpoint losses, appears to have been applied on top of the ground layer. Some underdrawing is visible to the naked eye, especially on the left. Infrared reflectography revealed a loose and rapid underdrawing in which the figures were not included.1 Several minor alterations were made in the paint layer, for instance in the position of the sails of the mill (fig. a). The composition was basically painted from the background to the foreground. A small area was reserved in the background for the house on the left. The paint was applied transparently and thinly, especially in the brown areas, with impasto in the leaves of the tree and some brushstrokes in the sky. The rendering of the landscape is very detailed. The paint was applied more opaquely in the figures, which were painted on top of the background.
Scientific examination and reports
- dendrochronology: J. Bauch, 15 November 1971
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 30 June 1995
- infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, no. G174, 30 May 2001
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 10 January 2005
Literature scientific examination and reports
Bauch et al. 1972, p. 488; Tjemkes 1982, pp. 12-13; Gifford 1996, p. 74; unpublished lecture by Edwin Buijsen, 29 October 2001
Condition
Good. Apart from minor retouchings in the sky, the paint layer is in good condition.
Provenance
...; collection Count Woronzoff;2...; collection Paul Delaroff (1852-1913), St Petersburg, 1906;3...; collection Kilian Hennessy (1907-?), Paris, 1956;4...; from the dealer William Hallsborough, London, fl. 60,740, to the museum with support from the Foto commissie, 1958
Object number: SK-A-3945
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum
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
These circular companion pieces of summer (shown here) and winter (see SK-A-3946), which are signed and dated in the same way, depict summer and winter. Tondos with winter and summer landscapes originated in the southern Netherlandish iconography of the seasons and months of the year, and also became popular in the northern Netherlands with the arrival of immigrants from the south.5 The young Van Goyen would have been introduced to the genre during his apprenticeship to Esaias van de Velde, the son of immigrants, who began producing summer and winter landscapes around 1615.
Van Goyen painted at least 22 pairs of this kind, in rectangular as well as circular formats, sixteen of which survive today.6 Almost all of them date from Van Goyen’s early period, in other words up until c. 1627, in which his oeuvre displays a close affinity to that of his teacher as regards subjects, style and palette.7
Van de Velde’s influence is still readily apparent in these tondos of 1625.8 The composition of both works consists of elements borrowed from Van de Velde, such as the tall tree to the left of center and the figures chatting in the foreground, which are already found in Van Goyen’s earliest dated painting, a tondo of 1620.9 Keyeshas pointed out that several characteristics of Van de Velde’s work recur in an enhanced form in his pupil’s paintings. Van Goyen’s trees are more prominent, for example, and the clouds more carefully modelled.10
The low horizon makes the Rijksmuseum Winter look a little more modern than Van de Velde’s ice scenes, but basically the planar structure of the composition still relies heavily on the 16th-century, southern Netherlandish tradition.11 The castle, which was not planned in the original design,12 recalls the work of southern artists like Hans Bol and David Vinckboons.13 This particular castle also features in an ice scene by Van Goyen dated 1624.14
De Bruyn Kops has also drawn attention to the similarity to winter scenes by the earliest northern Netherlandish practitioners of the genre, such as Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle, datable 1608-09, in London.15
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. 88.
Literature
Von Frimmel 1905b, p. 74; Hofstede de Groot 1923, p. 87, no. 357, pp. 289-90, no. 1172; Dobrzycka 1966, pp. 24, 26, 86, nos. 13, 14; Beck II, 1973, p. 7, no. 9, p. 57, no. 108; De Bruyn Kops in Amsterdam etc. 1987, pp. 318-21, nos. 31, 32; Sutton and Loughman in Madrid 1994, p. 114, nos. 23, 24, with full earlier literature; Huys Janssen in ’s-Hertogenbosch-Louvain 2002, p. 158
Collection catalogues
1960, p. 115, nos. 991 A 5, 991 A 6; 1976, p. 246, nos. A 3945, A 3946; 2007, no. 88
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Summer, 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8564
(accessed 10 November 2024 00:04:09).