A river estuary with shipping and fishermen on the shore

Jan van Goyen’s seascapes and estuary scenes of the 1640s are among his most successful compositions. It was in this period that he tended to adopt a horizontal format that frequently eschewed the diagonal structure that prevailed in his paintings of the 1630s. High, cloud-filled skies contrast with the flat terrain, resulting in what Hans Ulrich-Beck has described as ‘impressive pictorial achievements’.

Van Goyen never painted the open sea, preferring instead inland waterways like the Haarlemer Meer. In his paintings of the 1630s, the small craft that traversed these shallow waterways were often relegated to the painting’s background, while in the ensuing decade they came to occupy an increasingly more prominent place in the foreground of his compositions. A wijdschip viewed in profile and towing a rowboat dominates the painting’s central foreground, while further small sailing vessels dot the horizon, including one at right which has been careened on a sandbank, evidently to repair its hull. A tall beacon in the left middle ground helps to provide safe passage through the sinuous, narrow inlet while a pair of fisherman in the central foreground scour the riverbanks for mussels and clams.

This painting is a particularly impressive example of the technique for which van Goyen was most famed – the application of a limited range of colours whose dramatic effect belies its seeming simplicity. A subtle range of grays, silvers and whites combined with the deft use of the ochre-coloured ground in the darkest foreground passages and sky creates an almost monochromatic effect in paintings such as this. Moreover, the juxtaposition of thinly brushed areas against the thick, impastoed whites imbues the painting with the atmosphere of a crisp autumn day.

A copy of this painting on a canvas of somewhat larger scale and with the landscape extended at left and right was sold Galerie Hans Rudolph, Hamburg, 28 September 1950, lot 210.