A dune landscape with figures

This dune landscape was executed at the height of van Goyen’s career in the 1640s. The artist had achieved notable recognition as one of the foremost landscapists of his generation by the end of the preceding decade. Despite losing a great deal of money in 1637, supposedly through a failed venture in the tulip market, he was able to buy a house on the Singelgracht in The Hague in 1639 and was appointed head of the Guild of Saint Luke in the city in 1638, and again in 1640. He was astonishingly productive in the 1640s with over 450 known dated works from this decade alone. He was also intermittently active as an art dealer, auctioneer and estate agent.

The palette of this painting is predominantly grey, yellow and golden brown in tonal range. Although van Goyen employed a restricted palette in the 1640s, he was able to capture an enormous range of atmospheric effects and achieve a masterly sense of depth in his compositions. This was partly achieved by his expert use of a transparent ground, which allowed the natural grain of the wooden panel to appear through the oil glazes, most notably in the sky and water in his landscapes. Van Goyen has rendered this view with beautifully loose and skilful brush strokes. Whereas the clouds are painted with a vivid and broad handling of the brush, the landscape is executed in a liquid style, painted rapidly in the wet paint with great attention to the narrative. The artist’s inclusion of a well in the right middle ground of this picture adds both interest to the subject and an important compositional accent, which the artist also featured more prominently in the left foreground of a work in the following year, dated 1642 and now held in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow (Beck, op. cit., p. 459, no. 1022).