Panoramic View of the River Spaarne and the Haarlemmermeer

The support is an oak panel with a horizontal grain that was thinned to 2 mm in order to attach a cradle (now removed). A trace of an original panel bevel is visible at the right. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1585. The panel could have been ready for use by 1594, but a date in or after 1604 is more likely. A strip 2.3 cm wide along the top edge, which is now covered by the frame, is a remnant of a plank that was added in 1930. The whitish ground is transparent and thin; both the color and the grain of the wood can be seen through it. No underdrawing was detected with infrared reflectography. The paint was applied thinly and wet in wet in the background, and thickly with impasto in the staffage of the landscape.

unpublished entry by Ariane van Suchtelen, RMA, 1995; Gifford in Leiden 1996, pp. 76-77; Gifford 1997, pp. 204-07

Fair. There are several dents in the panel. Large areas in the sky have been overpainted. The varnish has discoloured slightly.

...; from Dr A. Pauli, Amsterdam, fl. 20,000, to Isaac de Bruijn (1872-1953), 1930; bequeathed to the museum by Isaac de Bruijn and his wife, Johanna Geertruida van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern, December 1961; on loan to the Museum Bredius, The Hague, since July 1993

ObjectNumber: SK-A-4044

Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland

In 1966, Beck discovered that a drawing in one of Van Goyen’s intact sketchbooks served as a preliminary study for this painting (fig. a).¹¹Beck 1966, p. 9, pl. 20; Buijsen 1993. See also Beck 1957 for other preliminary drawings in Van Goyen’s oeuvre. That sketch is one of a group of panoramic views on five sheets which were probably drawn from the crossing tower between the nave and transept of the St Bavokerk in Haarlem.²²Van Regteren Altena 1967, p. 249; for those drawings see Buijsen 1993, pp. 39-44.

Van Goyen must have been facing south in order to see this particular stretch of countryside. The river in the foreground is the Spaarne, which flowed into the Haarlemmer Lake, which was drained in the 19th century to prevent flooding. To the left behind the windmill is the Haarlem gallows field, and a little further to the right is a limekiln. The building with the two towers in the distance on the right is Kasteel Heemstede.³³Van Regteren Altena 1967, p. 249; further remarks on the topography have been taken from an unpublished entry by A. van Suchtelen, RMA, 1995. The composition corresponds to the right half of the drawing. At first sight Van Goyen seems to have followed the sketch quite faithfully, but closer examination reveals that he ‘stretched’ the landscape by increasing the distance between its various components.⁴⁴Buijsen 1996, p. 33.

In New York there is a panorama dated 1646 that is based on another drawing in the same series.⁵⁵The Metropolitan Museum of Art; coll. cat. New York 1995, p. 306, no. 71 (ill.); Beck II, 1973, pp. 440-41, no. 980. For a colour illustration see Amsterdam 2000b, p. 133. Beck dated the Rijksmuseum painting to c. 1646.⁶⁶Beck 1966, p. 14, note 18. Buijsen, who has shown that most of the drawings in the sketchbook were made in 1644, argues that the present painting must also have been completed in 1644 or a little later.⁷⁷Buijsen 1993, p. 42; see pp. 17-18, 96 for the dating of the sketchbook. Buijsen’s dating seems eminently plausible. The preliminary study for the Rijksmuseum painting is sketchy, and contains details which have been carefully worked up in the painted version, whereas the 1646 painting gives a freer interpretation of the sketches.⁸⁸See Liedtke 1995, p. 156, for the relationship between the work in New York and the drawings. Moreover, the Rijksmuseum painting displays great similarities to the Polder Landscape (SK-A-3249) in the museum, which bears the date 1644.⁹⁹Buijsen 1993, p. 42.

The painting has been described as a fragment.¹⁰¹⁰Cleveringa 1961; Beck 1966, p. 14, note 18. It was thought that it originally reproduced the entire drawing, and that it must have given the same sort of impression as the one in New York.¹¹¹¹Unpublished entry, A. van Suchtelen, RMA, 1995. If that is true, a great deal must have been lost, particularly on the left and at the top. That theory, though, has been demolished by Melanie Gifford’s discovery in 1996 of a small remnant of the original beveling on the left side of the panel.¹²¹²Written communication, 13 February 2004. On the evidence of that remnant it can be assumed that a strip no wider than 1.5-2.5 cm was sawn off on the left.¹³¹³Oral communication, Gwen Tauber, 2004; Gifford’s estimate of approximately 1 cm, given by Vogelaar in Leiden 1996, p. 119, seems to be somewhat on the cautious side. It is impossible to determine whether, and by how much, the painting was cropped on the other sides. However, there is little reason to believe that there was any drastic reduction, given the relationship to similar panoramas from this period, such as the compositionally related Polder Landscape (SK-A-3249), which is almost the same size.

As is usually the case with Van Goyen, the grain of the wood is visible through the paint, especially in the sky. Gifford believes that Van Goyen allowed the horizontal grain in the Rijksmuseum painting to contribute to the ripple effect in the water.¹⁴¹⁴Gifford 1996, pp. 76-77; on this see also the entry on SK-A-3249. It is conceivable that he did so while in the act of painting, but Gifford’s hypothesis that he also left the grain visible in his skies is decidedly implausible. Gifford twists things around by assuming that Van Goyen wanted to imitate the cloudy skies in prints by Willem Buytewech and others, because those hatchings were actually used by printmakers to suggest tone.

Van Goyen’s panoramas have been compared to those of Hercules Segers.¹⁵¹⁵See the entry on SK-A-3249. It is striking that in the 20th century the Rijksmuseum painting met the same fate as several by Segers did in the 17th, for in 1930 the sky was extended with the addition of a horizontal strip of wood 13 cm across, giving the painting a vertical format.¹⁶¹⁶It was in this period that it was attributed to Segers by W. Vogelsang; note RMA. See Van Gelder 1950 for paintings by Segers with enlarged skies. In 1932, the conservator A.M. de Wildt discovered the addition while investigating the pigments used in the painting.¹⁷¹⁷Letter of 12 October 1932; with thanks to Rick Hartmann. Most of the added plank was removed after the painting was acquired by the museum. Only a strip 2.3 cm wide at the top, which is now hidden by the frame, testifies to the former enlargement.

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. 95.

Beck 1966, p. 9; Beck II, 1973, p. 443, no. 984; Buijsen 1993, pp. 42-43; Gifford 1996, pp. 76-77; Vogelaar in Leiden 1996, p. 119, with earlier literature

1976, p. 247, no. A 4044 (as Panoramic View of a Wide River); 2007, no. 95

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Panoramic View of the River Spaarne and the Haarlemmermeer, in or after 1644', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8563