Panoramic View of a River with Low-Lying Meadows

The support is a single oak panel with a horizontal grain that is bevelled on all sides, the bevels varying from 2-4.5 cm in width. The paint of the ground layer is visible on and overall the edges, indicating that the support has retained its original dimensions. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1633. The panel could have been ready for use by 1644, but a date in or after 1650 is more likely. No underdrawing was found with infrared reflectography. Pigment analysis revealed that the ground is composed of two layers. The first consists of chalk, and the second layer of chalk, lead white, earth colours and black, which was applied very thinly. The paint layers consist of lead white, earth colours, black and colourless smalt. The paint was applied fluently and wet in wet, transparently in the hill and the farm in the foreground, and more opaquely in the sky and the background. Brushstrokes are visible in the sky. The palette is sober, consisting mainly of green, brown, yellow and grey tones.

unpublished entry by Ariane van Suchtelen, RMA, 1995

Good. There are small paint losses in the sky.

...; ? sale, Robert P. Roupell (†) et al. [section Robert P. Roupell], London (Christie et al.), 25 June 1887, no. 21 (‘A Landscape, with a cottage and peasants in the foreground, boats on a river, and a windmill in the distance. Signed, and dated 1641.12 3/4 in. x 17 1/2 in.’ [32.5 x 44.5 cm.]), £ 57 15s to Colnaghi;¹¹Copy RKD....; purchased by the Fürst von Liechtenstein, Vienna, from the dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris, 1890;²²Beck II, 1973, p. 437. given in exchange to the dealer H.O. Miethke, Vienna, 1894;³³Beck II, 1973, p. 437....; from T. Humphry Ward (1845-1926), London, fl. 4,820, to the museum, through the mediation of the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1903

ObjectNumber: SK-A-2133

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

In addition to many panoramas with a town in the distance, Van Goyen painted several extensive views in the first half of the 1640s in which buildings play only a minor role.⁴⁴Beck II, 1973, pp. 441-43, nos. 979-984. The group also includes SK-A-3249 and SK-A-4044. In this river landscape the horizon is exceptionally low, even for Van Goyen, with the sky taking up almost four-fifths of the picture surface. The rigid planar structure is broken by a repoussoir in the form of two figures on a mound with a young tree and a few bushes. Van Goyen generally used such foreground motifs in the early 1640s.⁵⁵See the panorama dated 1642 in Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste; Beck II, 1973, p. 440, no. 976 (ill.); Curie in Paris 1993, p. 111, no. 44 (ill.).

The date on this painting has caused a certain amount of confusion. It was read as 1641 in the 1903 catalogue of the Van Goyen exhibition and in other important publications, which is fully in line with Van Goyen’s stylistic development towards landscapes with fewer and fewer repoussoirs. However, dendrochronological examination in 1971 and again in 1995 showed that the tree from which the panel came could not have been felled before 1642.⁶⁶See Technical notes.

One possibility is that the date was simply read incorrectly, as so often happens with Van Goyen;⁷⁷See Beck I, 1972, ‘Einführung’, p. 66. another is that some of the digits are abraded. On the evidence of an infrared photograph taken in 1987 it was suggested that the final digit may originally have been a 5.⁸⁸Note RMA; it emerges from notes made by J. Bauch that researchers came to the same conclusion in 1971; written communication, Peter Klein, 27 February 2004. See also Bremmer 1920, pl. 82, in which the painting is described as being dated 1645. That infrared reflectogram is not very convincing though, and there seems to have been some wishful thinking involved when it was interpreted.

It is also possible that the signature and date are not autograph, but examination under the stereo microscope did not provide any firm evidence of that. It is true that the signature was added after the paint had dried, and in a colour not found anywhere else in the painting, but there are other instances of that in Van Goyen’s oeuvre.⁹⁹On this see the unpublished entry by A. van Suchtelen, RMA, 1995, in which she compared the paint of this signature with that of the one on SK-A-3249. All the same, there is cause for doubt, particularly because of the somewhat angular shape of the rather upright letters and numbers.¹⁰¹⁰With thanks to Melanie Gifford. Taking everything into account, a date of 1644 or shortly afterwards seems plausible. This places the picture in the same period as Van Goyen’s panoramic views in the vicinity of Haarlem (SK-A-3249 and SK-A-4044). which makes the artist’s development less linear than was thought.

In 1890 this painting was in Paris with the art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, who played an important part in reestablishing Van Goyen’s reputation with his 1873 exhibition on the artist in Vienna, and with the large number of Van Goyens he had from the 1870s on.¹¹¹¹Mantz 1875, p. 143; Beck I, 1972, ‘Einführung’, p. 20. Beck’s indexes identify more than 80 paintings which can be traced back to Sedelmeyer.

A mirror-image version of this work that Beck calls a copy is not a copy but a compositionally related landscape that was probably executed by a follower of Van Goyen.¹²¹²Panel, 24 x 30 cm; sale, Vienna (Dorotheum), 30 November 1943, no. 63a (ill.); Beck II, 1973, p. 437. No illustration has been found of the other copy listed in Beck: panel, approximately 18 x 24 cm, art dealer Hans Wendland, sold to a Dutch collector around 1935-40.

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. 96.

Hofstede de Groot 1923, p. 121, no. 497; Dobrzycka 1966, pp. 43, 100, no. 94; Beck II, 1973, p. 437, no. 972, with earlier literature

1903, p. 107, no. 989a; 1934, p. 110, no. 989a; 1960, p. 115, no. 991 A 1; 1976, p. 246, no. A 2133; 2007, no. 96

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Panoramic View of a River with Low-Lying Meadows, 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.8565