Landscape with Two Oaks

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.

Verslagen 1917, p. 12

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.

...; collection Leendert Dupper Willemsz (1799-1870), Dordrecht;¹¹Von Lützow 1870, p. 229. by whom bequeathed to the museum, 1870

ObjectNumber: SK-A-123

Credit line: Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht

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.²²Van Crimpen/Berends-Albert 1990, III, p. 1392. See also Amsterdam 2003, p. 245, no. 111.

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.³³A related work is the canvas dated 1645 in a private collection; illustrated in Beck II, 1973, p. 502, no. 1151. The subject of two divergent oaks is first found in a drawing of 1627,⁴⁴De Bruyn Kops in Amsterdam etc. 1987, p. 327 (ill.), p. 328. 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.⁵⁵Dobrzycka 1966, p. 65; Stechow 1966, p. 39; for Segers’s etching see Hollstein XXVI, 1982, no. 28 (ill.). 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,⁶⁶Beck II, 1973, p. 499. but Van Goyen took some liberties with the town and its geographical location.⁷⁷See De Bruyn Kops in Amsterdam etc. 1987, p. 328. 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.⁸⁸Beck II, 1973, p. 499. The 1639 painting (present whereabouts unknown) is illustrated in Beck II, 1973, p. 436, no. 969; see also De Bruyn Kops in Amsterdam etc. 1987, p. 328.

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.⁹⁹Bruyn 1987, pp. 95-96; for Van Goyen’s use of symbolism see also Raupp 1980, pp. 101-04. 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.¹⁰¹⁰Bruyn 1987, p. 96. For the interpretation of the painting see also Kloek in coll. cat. Amsterdam 2001, p. 120.

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.¹¹¹¹See Provenance. 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.

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

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

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