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Lot Essay
This lively scene is an extremely early work from Jan van Goyen’s Leiden period (1618-32). Fewer than ten paintings by van Goyen bearing dates before 1623, the year inscribed on this panel, are known. The young artist had returned to his native Leiden in 1618 following a year-long apprenticeship in the Haarlem studio of his sixth master, Esaias van de Velde, under whose instruction he made remarkable progress. Van de Velde was six years van Goyen’s senior and had been the first Dutch painter to abandon the mannerisms of the Flemish style in favour of more naturalistic landscape views. His tuition had a lasting impact on van Goyen that remained palpable into the second half of the 1620s. Van de Velde’s approach is principally felt in van Goyen’s treatment of space and atmosphere as well as his fluid, fluent handling of paint.
In his early landscapes from 1623 until about 1626, van Goyen regularly adopted an elongated rectangular format, which provided a panoramic setting for his narrative content. His characterful figures in these works play an unusually prominent role and are painted on top of the finished landscape, which he deliberately structured to act as a stage to be filled with staffage. In this respect, his landscapes emulate artists of the preceding generation, including Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick Avercamp. Indeed, the most prominent figural group in van Goyen’s painting includes a Traveller, viewed in profile with a young child on her back, reading a man’s palm. A similar group features can be found in the central left foreground in a painting by Avercamp datable to a few years earlier (fig. 1).
While water plays a central role in van Goyen’s early paintings of this type, this is one of only two examples depicting an open coastline (for the other, identified as a view of Scheveningen, see Beck, op. cit., II, no. 244a; III, no. 244a, illustrated). More frequently, he depicted inland waterways with ferries (see, for example, another work dated 1623, Beck, op. cit., II, no. 219). This nascent interest in coastal scenes presages the numerous beach scenes van Goyen would paint between 1632 and 1653 (see Beck, op. cit., II, nos. 923-967a).
In his early landscapes from 1623 until about 1626, van Goyen regularly adopted an elongated rectangular format, which provided a panoramic setting for his narrative content. His characterful figures in these works play an unusually prominent role and are painted on top of the finished landscape, which he deliberately structured to act as a stage to be filled with staffage. In this respect, his landscapes emulate artists of the preceding generation, including Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick Avercamp. Indeed, the most prominent figural group in van Goyen’s painting includes a Traveller, viewed in profile with a young child on her back, reading a man’s palm. A similar group features can be found in the central left foreground in a painting by Avercamp datable to a few years earlier (fig. 1).
While water plays a central role in van Goyen’s early paintings of this type, this is one of only two examples depicting an open coastline (for the other, identified as a view of Scheveningen, see Beck, op. cit., II, no. 244a; III, no. 244a, illustrated). More frequently, he depicted inland waterways with ferries (see, for example, another work dated 1623, Beck, op. cit., II, no. 219). This nascent interest in coastal scenes presages the numerous beach scenes van Goyen would paint between 1632 and 1653 (see Beck, op. cit., II, nos. 923-967a).