Panoramic View of a River with Low-lying Meadows, Jan van Goyen, in or after 1644 – (Jan Van Goyen) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Jan Van Goyen

Date: 1644

Size: 31 x 45 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

In addition to many panoramas with a town in the distance, Van Goyen painted several extensive views in the first half of the 1640s in which buildings play only a minor role.4 In this river landscape the horizon is exceptionally low, even for Van Goyen, with the sky taking up almost four-fifths of the picture surface. The rigid planar structure is broken by a repoussoir in the form of two figures on a mound with a young tree and a few bushes. Van Goyen generally used such foreground motifs in the early 1640s.5 The date on this painting has caused a certain amount of confusion. It was read as 1641 in the 1903 catalogue of the Van Goyen exhibition and in other important publications, which is fully in line with Van Goyen’s stylistic development towards landscapes with fewer and fewer repoussoirs. However, dendrochronological examination in 1971 and again in 1995 showed that the tree from which the panel came could not have been felled before 1642.6 One possibility is that the date was simply read incorrectly, as so often happens with Van Goyen;7 another is that some of the digits are abraded. On the evidence of an infrared photograph taken in 1987 it was suggested that the final digit may originally have been a 5.8 That infrared reflectogram is not very convincing though, and there seems to have been some wishful thinking involved when it was interpreted. It is also possible that the signature and date are not autograph, but examination under the stereo microscope did not provide any firm evidence of that. It is true that the signature was added after the paint had dried, and in a colour not found anywhere else in the painting, but there are other instances of that in Van Goyen’s oeuvre.9 All the same, there is cause for doubt, particularly because of the somewhat angular shape of the rather upright letters and numbers.10 Taking everything into account, a date of 1644 or shortly afterwards seems plausible. This places the picture in the same period as Van Goyen’s panoramic views in the vicinity of Haarlem (SK-A-3249 and SK-A-4044). which makes the artist’s development less linear than was thought. In 1890 this painting was in Paris with the art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, who played an important part in reestablishing Van Goyen’s reputation with his 1873 exhibition on the artist in Vienna, and with the large number of Van Goyens he had from the 1870s on.11 A mirror-image version of this work that Beck calls a copy is not a copy but a compositionally related landscape that was probably executed by a follower of Van Goyen.12 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. 96.