Lot Essay
The date inscribed on this exceptionally attractive late river landscape has been variously read as ‘1655’ (see, for example, H.-U. Beck, op. cit.) and, more recently, ‘1656’. If the latter dating is correct, as seems to be the case, the painting is one of only two dated works from the last year of Jan van Goyen’s life, the other of which being his Fishing boats on a wide inland lake in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (fig. 1). This marks a precipitous drop-off in van Goyen’s activity from the previous year, which proved to be among the artist’s most productive, with some forty surviving dated paintings known.
Compared with the painting in Frankfurt, whose earthen tone suffused in silver-tinged light is characteristic of van Goyen’s late activity, the broader tonal range and brilliant blue skyscape evident in the present painting is less frequently encountered in his work of the 1650s. The painting is also a fine demonstration of the continuing artistic dialogue between van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael, both of whom played a leading role in the development of tonal landscape painting in the second half of the 1620s and 1630s. Just as in the 1640s van Ruysdael borrowed from van Goyen large expanses of river and lake, introducing subtle variations of color into what had been largely monochromatic scenes, so too has van Goyen here adopted van Ruysdael’s brighter palette and included details like the ferry boat viewed perpendicularly in the painting’s lower right foreground. Such ferry boats were a ubiquitous compositional device found in van Ruysdael’s river scenes of the latter 1640s and early 1650s and lend his compositions of the period a greater sense of structure and visual appeal.
Compared with the painting in Frankfurt, whose earthen tone suffused in silver-tinged light is characteristic of van Goyen’s late activity, the broader tonal range and brilliant blue skyscape evident in the present painting is less frequently encountered in his work of the 1650s. The painting is also a fine demonstration of the continuing artistic dialogue between van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael, both of whom played a leading role in the development of tonal landscape painting in the second half of the 1620s and 1630s. Just as in the 1640s van Ruysdael borrowed from van Goyen large expanses of river and lake, introducing subtle variations of color into what had been largely monochromatic scenes, so too has van Goyen here adopted van Ruysdael’s brighter palette and included details like the ferry boat viewed perpendicularly in the painting’s lower right foreground. Such ferry boats were a ubiquitous compositional device found in van Ruysdael’s river scenes of the latter 1640s and early 1650s and lend his compositions of the period a greater sense of structure and visual appeal.