Object data
oil on panel
support: diameter 33.4 cm
frame: height 44 cm × width 44.5 cm × depth 5.5 cm
Jan van Goyen
Winter
1625
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower left, on a log: I. V Goien 1625.
Technical notes
The support is a circular, horizontally grained oak plank that was bevelled. The ground layer appears to be pinkish. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1612. The panel could have been ready for use by 1623, but a date in or after 1629 is more likely. Infrared reflectography revealed a rapid underdrawing.1 Whereas in the pendant, the drawing was followed in paint, several large alterations were made in the present painting. The most notable is the addition of the castle, which was not anticipated. A lower building, probably a large farm, was planned a little more to the left in the original design. A church that was drawn in the right background was not painted (![fig. a][fig. a]). The composition was basically painted from the background to the foreground, transparently with some impasto in the highlights and some brushmarking in the sky. The branches of the foreground tree were painted before the paint of the sky was completely dry. The figures were painted opaquely. As in the pendant, the figures were not included in the underdrawing or reserved in 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. G173, 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Bauch et al. 1972, p. 488; Tjemkes 1982, pp. 12-13; Gifford 1996, p. 74; unpublished lecture by E. Buijsen, 29 October 2001
Condition
Good. There is mild abrasion in the branches of the tree and the sky, and the yellow cloak of the figure on the left has become transparent.
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-3946
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 (see SK-A-3945) and winter (shown here), 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. 89.
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. 89
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Winter, 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8558
(accessed 22 November 2024 15:12:11).