This and the following 29 lots come from an album of some 270 studies which date from a journey made by the artist in 1650-1. The drawings are a record of buildings, landscapes, animals and figures which the artist rapidly sketched on a trip in the south-eastern part of Holland and into north-western Germany, from the drawings his route can be traced from his hometown of Leyden to Zaltbommel, Tiel, Nijmegen, Cleves, Emmerich, Elten, Arnhem and then back westwards to Amsterdam and its surrounding areas. The numbering of the album in the upper right corner is probably not autograph, although probably contemporary, and in some cases where the artist has drawn on both sides of the paper this has resulted in the duplication of numbers. The album was complete until the 1950s and single sheets have been sold at Christie's, Amsterdam, 25 November 1992, lot 578, illustrated and from the Roesler Collection, sold in these Rooms, 31 May 1990, lot 80-3, illustrated.
Although van Goyen, unlike so many of his fellow artists, never left Holland to study in Italy, he made a number of long journeys which can be traced through the albums of drawings in which he recorded his impressions of the changing landscape and architecture. From the 1630s he made short journeys in the environs of Leyden and later around Haarlem and The Hague; in the 1640s he travelled south-east along the Rhine to Emmerich and Elten and in about 1648 he went south towards Antwerp and Brussels. As van Goyen was a specialist painter and draftsmanman of landscapes such journeys were important in suggesting new motifs, both architectural and geographical, which the flat landscape around Leiden and Amsterdam could not provide.
Professor Beck has traced five albums, only one of which has remained intact: a group of drawings of about 1630 in the Albertina, Vienna; a composite album of circa 1627-35 in the British Museum; the only complete one dating from 1644-9 in the Bredius Museum, The Hague; one from the same period is at Dresden; and finally the last one, from which the present studies come and which dates from 1650-1. Although all the drawings in the albums were clearly drawn with great rapidity, the landscapes often conform to the compositional formula which he used for his paintings, with something placed in the foreground to heighten the recession; an example of this is the drawing of the dunes, lot 244. The practical nature of these drawings is reflected in the number which record buildings which would have been useful for the backgrounds of his landscape paintings. Equally the rapid sketches of fishermen carrying baskets (lot 238) or the waggon on the road (lot 233) would have been a useful repositary of ideas for the staffage in his paintings. All the drawings are drawn in his favored medium of black chalk, the grey wash must, for practical reasons, have been added at a later stage by the artist.
The great difference between van Goyen's finished sheets, such as the view of Scheveningen (lot 219), and the album drawings has been commented upon by the late Professor van Regteren Altena in relation to the Bredius album, but it is equally pertinent to those of the present group: '[the] opportunity of a comparison of drawings worked out at home with those after nature illustrates how different they are in character. One may speak of two sorts of art, and extend the comparisons to contemporaries such as Rembrandt and Ruisdael.....The quickly found and faultlessly registered effect is based on a mastery in evocation of remarkably limited means; not a moment the viewer will feel anything would be missing from the small works of art. One may therefore classify these as one of the highest forms of art', J.Q. van Regteren Altena, Oud Holland, 1967, 4, pp. 248-50