The support is a circular, horizontally grained oak plank that was bevelled. The ground layer appears to be pinkish. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1612. The panel could have been ready for use by 1623, but a date in or after 1629 is more likely. Infrared reflectography revealed a rapid underdrawing.¹¹Infrared reflectography (IRR) was performed with a Grundig FA 70 television camera equipped with a Hamamatsu N 214 IR vidicon (1975); a Kodak wratten 87A filter cutting-on at 0.9 micron was placed between the vidicon target surface and the Zoomar 1:2 8/4 cm Macro Zoomatar lens. The television camera was mounted on a sturdy Linhof professional tripod with extension pieces, and a 90 cm sledge for moving the camera side-ways. The monitor was a Grundig BG 12 with 875 television lines. Documentation was done with a Nikon camera, a 50 mm macrolens, and Ilford film FP 4, ASA 125. The IRR-assembly reproduced here was made with Adobe Photoshop 5.5 and consists of images which were scanned on 1012 ppi with Polaroid Sprint Scan 35/Plus from photo negatives belonging to the archive of J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer at the RKD. Whereas in the pendant, the drawing was followed in paint, several large alterations were made in the present painting. The most notable is the addition of the castle, which was not anticipated. A lower building, probably a large farm, was planned a little more to the left in the original design. A church that was drawn in the right background was not painted (![fig. a][fig. a]). The composition was basically painted from the background to the foreground, transparently with some impasto in the highlights and some brushmarking in the sky. The branches of the foreground tree were painted before the paint of the sky was completely dry. The figures were painted opaquely. As in the pendant, the figures were not included in the underdrawing or reserved in the background.

Bauch et al. 1972, p. 488; Tjemkes 1982, pp. 12-13; Gifford 1996, p. 74; unpublished lecture by E. Buijsen, 29 October 2001

Good. There is mild abrasion in the branches of the tree and the sky, and the yellow cloak of the figure on the left has become transparent.

…; collection Count Woronzoff;²²Von Frimmel 1905b, p. 74.…; collection Paul Delaroff (1852-1913), St Petersburg, 1906;³³Von Frimmel 1905b, p. 74; not in the catalogues of Delaroff ’s sales, Paris (Galerie Georges Petit), 23 April 1914, and Paris (Hôtel Drouot), 27 April 1914.…; collection Kilian Hennessy (1907-?), Paris, 1956;⁴⁴Note RMA.…; from the dealer William Hallsborough, London, fl. 60,740, to the museum with support from the Foto commissie, 1958

Object number: SK-A-3946

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum

These circular companion pieces of summer (see SK-A-3945) and winter (shown here), which are signed and dated in the same way, depict summer and winter. Tondos with winter and summer landscapes originated in the southern Netherlandish iconography of the seasons and months of the year, and also became popular in the northern Netherlands with the arrival of immigrants from the south.⁵⁵See Moiso-Diekamp 1987, pp. 138-44, 537-42; Van Suchtelen in The Hague 2001, pp. 28-49; Bruijnen 2002. The young Van Goyen would have been introduced to the genre during his apprenticeship to Esaias van de Velde, the son of immigrants, who began producing summer and winter landscapes around 1615.

Van Goyen painted at least 22 pairs of this kind, in rectangular as well as circular formats, sixteen of which survive today.⁶⁶Moiso-Diekamp 1987, p. 67; a survey will be found in Madrid 1994, p. 114, note 11. Almost all of them date from Van Goyen’s early period, in other words up until c. 1627, in which his oeuvre displays a close affinity to that of his teacher as regards subjects, style and palette.⁷⁷For Van Goyen’s early development see Volhard 1927, pp. 39-60; Beck I, 1972, ‘Einführung’, pp. 39-40; Wurfbain 1981.

Van de Velde’s influence is still readily apparent in these tondos of 1625.⁸⁸See, for example, Keyes 1984, pp. 154-55, no. 130 (dated 1616), p. 144, no. 90, pls. 79-80. The composition of both works consists of elements borrowed from Van de Velde, such as the tall tree to the left of center and the figures chatting in the foreground, which are already found in Van Goyen’s earliest dated painting, a tondo of 1620.⁹⁹Private collection; Minty in New Orleans 1997, pp. 51-52, no. 20 (ill.); Beck II, 1973, p. 53, no. 99 (ill.). Keyeshas pointed out that several characteristics of Van de Velde’s work recur in an enhanced form in his pupil’s paintings. Van Goyen’s trees are more prominent, for example, and the clouds more carefully modelled.¹⁰¹⁰Keyes 1984, p. 141.

The low horizon makes the Rijksmuseum Winter look a little more modern than Van de Velde’s ice scenes, but basically the planar structure of the composition still relies heavily on the 16th-century, southern Netherlandish tradition.¹¹¹¹On which see Van Suchtelen in The Hague 2001, pp. 39-53. The castle, which was not planned in the original design,¹²¹²See Technical notes for SK-A-3946. recalls the work of southern artists like Hans Bol and David Vinckboons.¹³¹³Whose compositions were also turned into prints; see, for example, Hollstein III, 1950, p. 46 (ill.), p. 47, no. 22, XXXVII, 1991, p. 15, no. 5 (ill.). This particular castle also features in an ice scene by Van Goyen dated 1624.¹⁴¹⁴Present whereabouts unknown; Beck II, 1973, p. 17 (ill.)

De Bruyn Kops has also drawn attention to the similarity to winter scenes by the earliest northern Netherlandish practitioners of the genre, such as Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle, datable 1608-09, in London.¹⁵¹⁵The National Gallery; coll. cat. London 1991, I, pp. 3-4, II, pl. 3; De Bruyn Kops in Amsterdam etc. 1987, pp. 320-21. Compare, also, the Winter Pleasures of c. 1615 catalogued as Adriaen van de Venne in a private collection (illustrated in New Orleans 1997, p. 143), which Minty (in New Orleans 1997, p. 51) associates with the Rijksmuseum’s Winter.

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. 89.

Von Frimmel 1905b, p. 74; Hofstede de Groot 1923, p. 87, no. 357, pp. 289-90, no. 1172; Dobrzycka 1966, pp. 24, 26, 86, nos. 13, 14; Beck II, 1973, p. 7, no. 9, p. 57, no. 108; De Bruyn Kops in Amsterdam etc. 1987, pp. 318-21, nos. 31, 32; Sutton and Loughman in Madrid 1994, p. 114, nos. 23, 24, with full earlier literature; Huys Janssen in ’s-Hertogenbosch-Louvain 2002, p. 158

1960, p. 115, nos. 991 A 5, 991 A 6; 1976, p. 246, nos. A 3945, A 3946; 2007, no. 89

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Winter, 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200109335