A river landscape with travellers approaching a village

This is one of fifteen paintings by van Goyen dated 1624, and one of the largest and most ambitiously conceived of his early landscapes. As with most of his output from the early 1620s, the present picture attests strongly to the influence of Esaias van de Velde under whom he had studied between 1616-18. The richly dressed, colourful figures, the the local colouration and the compositional structure of the landscape are all largely indebted to his teacher. From a slightly raised viewpoint, van Goyen here employs three main axes that lead the eye into the landscape; the cascade in the centre flanked by two paths on either side: one leading into the village and the other into the open landscape on the right. Typically, the view is framed by trees on either side and the skyline broken by a church tower in the middle distance. In many of these respects, the picture can be compared with his second largest panel from 1624 and by far the most famous of his pictures from that year - the Winter Landscape with skaters on the Ice before Castle Batestein and St. Pol's Tower, near Vianen, which is in the collection of Willem Baron van Dedem (see P. Sutton, Dutch and Flemish Paintings - The Collection of Willem Baron van Dedem, London, 2002, pp. 100-105, no. 17).