Artist: Jan Van Goyen
Date: 1641
Size: 92 x 130 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
The Valkhof in Nijmegen is one of the most important medieval sites in the Netherlands. Emperor Frederick I, nicknamed Barbarossa (c. 1122/4-90), ordered it to be built on this particular spot because legend had it that buildings erected by Charlemagne and Julius Caesar had once stood there. The complex was demolished in 1796-97.2 Jan van Goyen was the artist who introduced it as a subject in Dutch painting,3 and between 1633 and 1654 he made more than 30 paintings of this former imperial palace on the river Waal.4 The painting in the Rijksmuseum dates from 1641, and is executed in the restricted palette typical of Van Goyen’s work of the first half of the 1640s. The stronghold is seen from the north-west in a composition that differs little from some earlier depictions of the Valkhof from the same point of the compass, such as the one dated 1638 in Bonn.5 One new addition is the heavily laden ferry in the left foreground, a motif that is also found in the work of Van Goyen’s teacher, Esaias van de Velde (see SK-A-1293). Van Goyen began producing more and more views of the Valkhof in the course of the 1640s, and its rising popularity in that period may have had something to do with his monumental painting of 1641 of the same subject in the townhall in Nijmegen, which, it has been suggested, may have been commissioned by the city authorities (fig. a).6 There were no known preliminary studies for these paintings until a drawing surfaced a few years ago inscribed ‘Valck Hof tot nimmegen’, probably in Van Goyen’s own hand. Beck dates it to 1633 or a little earlier, and argues persuasively that this fairly detailed study was the model for all of Van Goyen’s many views of the Valkhof from the north-west.7 One occasionally finds minor differences in the architecture and the proportions of the buildings.8 For example, the number of windows in the donjon, called the Giant Tower, in the Rijksmuseum painting differs from that in the abovementioned Nijmegen painting, and the two houses to the left of the tower do not have the step gables seen in that picture. 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. 91.
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