Goyen, Jan van

Description:

Leiden 1596 - Den Haag 1656
26,5 x 44 cm
View into an extensive river valley. Oil/oak panel, monogrammed and dated VG 1639.
Dr. Azam Collection, Bordeaux; Sale F. Muller & Co, Paris, Dec. 1909, no. 33; Sale Amsterdam, Nov. 1910, no. 46; Alfred Brod Gallery, London; Ferdinand III Mülhens Collection, Cologne, Dec. 1980.
Jan van Goyen is undisputedly one of the leading landscape painters of the Golden Age. With Salomon van Ruysdael, Pieter de Moleyn and Jan Porcellis, he developed the so-called tonal landscape painting, a painting with an almost monochrome colour palette that dominated all his later works. The panel presented here from 1639 is a typical example of this. A contemplative, wide landscape, Hans-Ulrich Beck summarizes this group of works under the term "distant views", with a deeply drawn sky (which makes up three quarters of the composition), with uniformity of colour, a delicate gradation in gray (sky) or brown tones. The only "pole of unrest" is a small hill shifted to the lower right third, with two conspicuously withered oak trees and small figural staffage. This is where the viewer's gaze should be drawn to first, before it wanders down into a quiet, flat plain crossed by a barely visible river.
Literature:
Hofstede de Groot, vol. VIII, no. 26 and 466;
Hans-Ulrich Beck, Jan van Goyen, 1973, no. 969.