A dune landscape with figures and horsemen by a well

Jan van Goyen was one of the greatest and most prolific seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists. Prior to 1626, his early works closely resembled those of his teacher Esaias van de Velde, but from the 1630s onwards, van Goyen and his famous Haarlem colleagues, Salomon van Ruysdael, Pieter de Molijn and Jan Porcellis, developed a new tonal manner, with an almost monochrome palette. Van Goyen reached the pinnacle of his creative genius in the 1640s, when this painting was executed. By the end of the preceding decade the artist had achieved notable recognition as a landscapist and a certain amount of stability in his private life. Despite losing a great deal of money in 1637, supposedly through a failed venture in the tulip market, he bought a house on the Singelgracht in The Hague in 1639 and was appointed head of the Guild of Saint Luke there in 1638 and 1640. He was astonishingly productive in the 1640s with over 450 known dated works from this decade alone. This, while he was also intermittently active as an art dealer, auctioneer and estate agent, in order to supplement his earnings. Van Goyen's inclusion of a well in the right middle ground of this painting adds both interest to the subject and an important compositional accent. A well features more prominently in the left foreground in a painting dated the following year, 1642, in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow (Beck, op. cit., p. 459, no. 1022).