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Lot Essay
This spirited panel is one of Jan van Goyen’s earliest works, painted in around 1622-3, shortly after his first dated picture of 1620. The artist was most likely exposed to this type of composition by his master Esaias van de Velde, whose dramatic advances in the depiction of Dutch landscape painting had a profound influence on his pupil. Van Goyen would go on to develop the genre and become perhaps the most important exponent of the Haarlem school of ‘tonal’ painting, which purposefully turned away from the picturesque, highly coloured landscapes of their Flemish contemporaries to provide a more truthful view of the countryside as it appeared in reality.
Around the turreted walls of an imaginary town, townsfolk converge on the frozen waterway to converse, skate and play kolf. While the landscape teems with life, the top of the panel is given over almost entirely to the clear sky and the peaceful town in the middle-ground. Van Goyen uses a reduced palette of warm brown and grey tones, eloquently balanced with silvery highlights. The artist favoured the use of a low horizon and frequently employed carefully organised visual devices, such as meandering canals and compositional layering, to create a feeling of depth in the landscape.
Winter landscapes were a favoured subject for van Goyen during his early career, no doubt still under the influence of van de Velde’s designs of ice skaters in inclement northern weather. Painted on both circular and rectangular supports, these scenes were frequently conceived as pendants to contrasting summer landscapes. Such depictions of the local landscape at different times of the year can be traced back to the calendar illustrations for medieval Books of Hours, such as the Limbourg Brothers’ celebrated Tres Riches Heures illuminated for the Duc de Berry. The illuminations would include Saint's Days and other religious feasts listed by month, and on the facing page a painted representation of the specific activity connected to that time of year. Depictions of the Twelve Months and the Seasons continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when their greatest exponent became Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who established this genre as an independent category of painting.
Around the turreted walls of an imaginary town, townsfolk converge on the frozen waterway to converse, skate and play kolf. While the landscape teems with life, the top of the panel is given over almost entirely to the clear sky and the peaceful town in the middle-ground. Van Goyen uses a reduced palette of warm brown and grey tones, eloquently balanced with silvery highlights. The artist favoured the use of a low horizon and frequently employed carefully organised visual devices, such as meandering canals and compositional layering, to create a feeling of depth in the landscape.
Winter landscapes were a favoured subject for van Goyen during his early career, no doubt still under the influence of van de Velde’s designs of ice skaters in inclement northern weather. Painted on both circular and rectangular supports, these scenes were frequently conceived as pendants to contrasting summer landscapes. Such depictions of the local landscape at different times of the year can be traced back to the calendar illustrations for medieval Books of Hours, such as the Limbourg Brothers’ celebrated Tres Riches Heures illuminated for the Duc de Berry. The illuminations would include Saint's Days and other religious feasts listed by month, and on the facing page a painted representation of the specific activity connected to that time of year. Depictions of the Twelve Months and the Seasons continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when their greatest exponent became Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who established this genre as an independent category of painting.