Artist: Jan Van Goyen
Date: 1645
Size: 131 x 165 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
One frequently recurring theme in Van Goyen’s river scenes of the 1640s is that of the waterside inn, invariably combined with a group of travellers with horses and one or more carts.3 His oeuvre has this motif in common with that of the Haarlem artist Salomon van Ruysdael, who produced variations on this theme from the mid-1630s and whose development has numerous parallels with Van Goyen’s.4 The size, composition and style of the Rijksmuseum painting are reminiscent of Van Ruysdael’s Halt at the Inn dated 1644, now in Adelaide.5 On the signboard outside the inn is a swan, but that is no help in identifying this particular location, for there were countless inns with the word ‘swan’ in their names, and the swan was one of the commonest devices on the signboards of taverns and inns.6 The village on the right behind the inn was at one time identified as Overschie, near Rotterdam, because of the similarity to a sketch by Van Goyen with the inscription ‘Oudeschie’.7 However, the pointed spire of the church in the drawing and the painting differs from that of the Grote Kerk in Overschie, so that identification had already been rejected by Beck.8 Comparison with similar landscapes suggests that the artist put this village together himself, as he did on more than one occasion.9 This river view, executed predominantly in shades of brown and green, and criticized by the 19th-century art critic Théophile Thoré as being ‘grand, vrais, mais pastrès-heureux’,10 is among Van Goyen’s larger works, which were painted chiefly in the period 1641-44.11 Gerdien Wuestman, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 97.
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