Object data
oil on panel
support: height 21.3 cm × width 30 cm
frame: height 29 cm × width 37.7 cm
sight size: height 20.9 cm × width 29.6 cm
Jan van Goyen
Panoramic View of the River Spaarne and the Haarlemmermeer
in or after 1644
Technical notes
The support is an oak panel with a horizontal grain that was thinned to 2 mm in order to attach a cradle (now removed). A trace of an original panel bevel is visible at the right. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1585. The panel could have been ready for use by 1594, but a date in or after 1604 is more likely. A strip 2.3 cm wide along the top edge, which is now covered by the frame, is a remnant of a plank that was added in 1930. The whitish ground is transparent and thin; both the color and the grain of the wood can be seen through it. No underdrawing was detected with infrared reflectography. The paint was applied thinly and wet in wet in the background, and thickly with impasto in the staffage of the landscape.
Scientific examination and reports
- X-radiography: RMA, no. 579, 2 July 1952
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 30 June 1995
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 3 March 2004
Literature scientific examination and reports
unpublished entry by Ariane van Suchtelen, RMA, 1995; Gifford in Leiden 1996, pp. 76-77; Gifford 1997, pp. 204-07
Condition
Fair. There are several dents in the panel. Large areas in the sky have been overpainted. The varnish has discoloured slightly.
Conservation
- conservator unknown, 1961: cleaned; an 11.5 cm strip of wood of the top plank added in 1930 removed
- M. van de Laar, 1987: complete restoration; cradle removed
Provenance
...; from Dr A. Pauli, Amsterdam, fl. 20,000, to Isaac de Bruijn (1872-1953), 1930; bequeathed to the museum by Isaac de Bruijn and his wife, Johanna Geertruida van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern, December 1961; on loan to the Museum Bredius, The Hague, since July 1993
Object number: SK-A-4044
Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland
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 1966, Beck discovered that a drawing in one of Van Goyen’s intact sketchbooks served as a preliminary study for this painting (fig. a).1 That sketch is one of a group of panoramic views on five sheets which were probably drawn from the crossing tower between the nave and transept of the St Bavokerk in Haarlem.2
Van Goyen must have been facing south in order to see this particular stretch of countryside. The river in the foreground is the Spaarne, which flowed into the Haarlemmer Lake, which was drained in the 19th century to prevent flooding. To the left behind the windmill is the Haarlem gallows field, and a little further to the right is a limekiln. The building with the two towers in the distance on the right is Kasteel Heemstede.3 The composition corresponds to the right half of the drawing. At first sight Van Goyen seems to have followed the sketch quite faithfully, but closer examination reveals that he ‘stretched’ the landscape by increasing the distance between its various components.4
In New York there is a panorama dated 1646 that is based on another drawing in the same series.5 Beck dated the Rijksmuseum painting to c. 1646.6 Buijsen, who has shown that most of the drawings in the sketchbook were made in 1644, argues that the present painting must also have been completed in 1644 or a little later.7 Buijsen’s dating seems eminently plausible. The preliminary study for the Rijksmuseum painting is sketchy, and contains details which have been carefully worked up in the painted version, whereas the 1646 painting gives a freer interpretation of the sketches.8 Moreover, the Rijksmuseum painting displays great similarities to the Polder Landscape (SK-A-3249) in the museum, which bears the date 1644.9
The painting has been described as a fragment.10 It was thought that it originally reproduced the entire drawing, and that it must have given the same sort of impression as the one in New York.11 If that is true, a great deal must have been lost, particularly on the left and at the top. That theory, though, has been demolished by Melanie Gifford’s discovery in 1996 of a small remnant of the original beveling on the left side of the panel.12 On the evidence of that remnant it can be assumed that a strip no wider than 1.5-2.5 cm was sawn off on the left.13 It is impossible to determine whether, and by how much, the painting was cropped on the other sides. However, there is little reason to believe that there was any drastic reduction, given the relationship to similar panoramas from this period, such as the compositionally related Polder Landscape (SK-A-3249), which is almost the same size.
As is usually the case with Van Goyen, the grain of the wood is visible through the paint, especially in the sky. Gifford believes that Van Goyen allowed the horizontal grain in the Rijksmuseum painting to contribute to the ripple effect in the water.14 It is conceivable that he did so while in the act of painting, but Gifford’s hypothesis that he also left the grain visible in his skies is decidedly implausible. Gifford twists things around by assuming that Van Goyen wanted to imitate the cloudy skies in prints by Willem Buytewech and others, because those hatchings were actually used by printmakers to suggest tone.
Van Goyen’s panoramas have been compared to those of Hercules Segers.15 It is striking that in the 20th century the Rijksmuseum painting met the same fate as several by Segers did in the 17th, for in 1930 the sky was extended with the addition of a horizontal strip of wood 13 cm across, giving the painting a vertical format.16 In 1932, the conservator A.M. de Wildt discovered the addition while investigating the pigments used in the painting.17 Most of the added plank was removed after the painting was acquired by the museum. Only a strip 2.3 cm wide at the top, which is now hidden by the frame, testifies to the former enlargement.
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. 95.
Literature
Beck 1966, p. 9; Beck II, 1973, p. 443, no. 984; Buijsen 1993, pp. 42-43; Gifford 1996, pp. 76-77; Vogelaar in Leiden 1996, p. 119, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1976, p. 247, no. A 4044 (as Panoramic View of a Wide River); 2007, no. 95
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Panoramic View of the River Spaarne and the Haarlemmermeer, 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.8563
(accessed 21 September 2024 08:46:59).