Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 88.5 cm × width 110.5 cm
sight size: height 86.5 cm × width 108.7 cm
Jan van Goyen
Landscape with Two Oaks
1641
Inscriptions
- signature and date, bottom centre: VG 1641
Technical notes
The support is a medium-weave canvas that has been lined. Slight cusping is visible along the top and bottom edges. When this painting was acquired by the museum, the canvas was on a smaller stretcher, with the excess edges folded over on all sides, but during conservation in 1917 the painting was restored to its original size. The dimensions given in the Rijksmuseum collection catalogues prior to the 1917 restoration are 83 x 102 cm. The ground, which can be seen through the paint layer, is probably beige, and on top of that there is a thin grey layer. The composition was painted from the background to the foreground. The darker passages, such as the foreground and the leaves in shadow, done with fluid paint, are thin and transparent. The paint is thick and opaque in the light areas. There are impasted highlights in the trees, the branches and the sunlit leaves. The figures were painted on top of the background.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: M. Chavannes, RMA, 16 March 2005
Literature scientific examination and reports
Verslagen 1917, p. 12
Condition
Fair. The sky and several other areas are abraded. The folds, fillings and retouchings along the edges are due to attachment to the former stretcher, which was too small. There is noticeable craquelure in the paint layer, and a horizontal line of tented paint 15 cm from the top edge.
Conservation
- P.N. Bakker, 1917: an earlier reduction made for framing purposes reversed; transferred to a stretcher of the original size; the edges that were folded over on all sides retouched, and the nail-holes filled
- conservator unknown, 1954: cleaned
- L. Kuiper, 1970: discoloured areas of retouching removed
- H. Kat, 2000: complete restoration
Provenance
...; collection Leendert Dupper Willemsz (1799-1870), Dordrecht;1 by whom bequeathed to the museum, 1870
Object number: SK-A-123
Credit line: Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Jan van Goyen (Leiden 1596 - The Hague 1656)
Jan van Goyen, the son of a cobbler, was born in Leiden on 13 January 1596. According to the Leiden chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers, from 1606 onward he was a pupil successively of the Leiden painters Coenraet van Schilperoort, Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg (1537/38-1614) and Jan Adriansz de Man, a glass-painter named Clock and Willem Gerritsz in Hoorn. After spending a year in France, he trained in 1617-18 with the landscape painter Esaias van de Velde in Haarlem. Van Goyen subsequently returned to his birthplace, where he married Anna Willemsdr van Raelst on 5 August 1618. He is recorded several times in Leiden archives between 1625 and 1631. In 1632, Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he acquired citizenship two years later. In 1634, he worked for some time in Isaack van Ruisdael’s workshop in Haarlem. Van Goyen was head man of the Hague guild in 1638 and 1640. In 1651, he was commissioned to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the burgomaster’s room in the Hague Town Hall, for which he received 650 guilders. Documents reveal that throughout his life Van Goyen had speculated with little success in various businesses, including property and tulips. Van Goyen died at the age of 60 in The Hague on 27 April 1656, leaving debts of at least 18,000 guilders.
Van Goyen was among the most prolific and innovative of all 17th-century Dutch artists. He painted landscapes and seascapes, river scenes and town views. His oeuvre comprises more than 1,200 paintings and about 1,500 drawings, several hundred of which are still in the original sketchbooks. Many of his works are dated, ranging from 1620 to 1656. His early landscapes are polychrome, and closely resemble those by his teacher Esaias van de Velde. From c. 1626 he moved away from this example. With Salomon van Ruysdael, Pieter de Molijn and Jan Porcellis, he was a pioneer of the ‘tonal’ style that introduced a new standard of naturalism to landscape painting. His dune and river landscapes from the 1630s are executed in a palette of browns and greens. In the early 1640s he painted townscapes and panoramic landscapes that are dominated by a brown tonality. Around 1645, here turned to a more natural colour range. Van Goyen was a highly influential painter. He had many followers and imitators, among them Wouter Knijf, Anthonie Jansz van der Croos and Maerten Fransz van der Hulst. One of his pupils was Jan Steen (c. 1625/26-79). According to Houbraken, others were Nicolaes Berchem (1620-83) and Arent Arentsz, called Cabel (1585/86-1631).
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
References
Orlers 1641, pp. 373-74; Van Hoogstraeten 1678, p. 237; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 166-68, 170-71, II, 1719, pp. 110, 111, 235, III, 1721, p. 13; Bredius 1896 (documents); Bredius 1916; Bredius 1919; Beck I, 1972, ‘Einführung’, pp. 15-22, 29-38 (documents), pp. 39-66; Beck in Turner 1996, pp. 255-58
Entry
The monumental Landscape with Two Oaks is one of Van Goyen’s most famous and most reproduced works. Among its admirers was Vincent van Gogh, who spoke glowingly about it in a letter of 1885 to his brother Theo. This painting led Van Gogh to describe Van Goyen as an artist who did not ‘imitate’ nature but ‘recreated’ it.2
The main subject is the two weathered oaks standing on a hill in a vast landscape. Van Goyen created the suggestion of menacing skies by allowing a little sunlight to shine through the dark clouds here and there. There are many crooked, gnarled oaks in his oeuvre, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Occasionally he would allow a single withered oak to dominate the landscape, but it was more usual for him to put two trees side by side, each growing in a different direction, as in this painting.3 The subject of two divergent oaks is first found in a drawing of 1627,4 and recurs right through to the late oeuvre.
Various authors have associated the way in which the artist, in this and other works, used an imposing group of trees as a repoussoir in his panoramas with an etching in which Hercules Segers tried to achieve the same effect with a single old oak.5 A more likely source of influence, however, is the work of Salomon van Ruysdael, who painted a panoramic view of Amersfoort with a huge tree in the foreground in 1634 (fig. a), the year in which Van Goyen was working in the studio of Salomon’s brother, Isaack van Ruisdael.
The town in the distance on the left has been recognized as Wageningen, on the Rhine, while the hills in the background have been identified as the Wageningse Berg and the Grebbeberg,6 but Van Goyen took some liberties with the town and its geographical location.7 The same landscape, without the town and with a similar but clearly different pair of trees in the foreground, is found in a painting of 1639 by Van Goyen.8
Bruyn wrote a debatable essay dealing, among other things, with the underlying meaning of the Landscape with Two Oaks, which he claimed was an example of how transience was the central theme in Van Goyen’s oeuvre.9 According to him, the old, withered oaks should be seen as symbols of vanitas, while other details, like the men talking under the trees and the figure seen from behind fit into an iconographic programme illustrating the themes of futility and life’s fleeting nature.10
It is stated in various museum and oeuvre catalogues that this painting was once in the collection of Adriaan Lacoste, but that is based on a misunderstanding. The painting was in the collection of Leendert Dupper Willemsz in Dordrecht together with a View of the Merwede off Dordrecht (SK-A-121), which was also thought to be by Van Goyen but is now attributed to Jeronymus van Diest.11 Van Diest’s painting was in the Lacoste collection before entering Dupper’s. The notion held by Hofstede de Groot and later authors that the present painting was also in the Lacoste collection is incorrect, and was based on the statement in the museum catalogue of 1903 that both of these paintings had the same provenance. What was meant was simply that they were both in the Dupper collection.
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. 90.
Literature
Hofstede de Groot 1923, p. 66, no. 267; Dobrzycka 1966, pp. 43, 65, 100, no. 93; Beck II, 1973, p. 499, no. 1144; De Bruyn Kops in Amsterdam etc. 1987, pp. 326-28, no. 36; Vogelaar in Leiden 1996, pp. 108-09, with earlier literature; Monrad in Copenhagen-Amsterdam 2001, p. 166, no. 31
Collection catalogues
1870, p. 227, no. XVIII; 1880, p. 109, no. 103; 1887, p. 52, no. 408; 1903, p. 107, no. 990; 1934, p. 110, no. 990 (incorrect provenance); 1960, p. 114, no. 990 (incorrect provenance); 1976, p. 246, no. A 123; 2007, no. 90
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Landscape with Two Oaks, 1641', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8562
(accessed 5 June 2024 11:25:45).