The support is a circular oak plank with a horizontal grain that is slightly bevelled. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1607. The panel could have been ready for use by 1618, but a date in or after 1624 is more likely. The thin white ground can be seen along the edges. A pinkish imprimatura, visible in the pinpoint losses, appears to have been applied on top of the ground layer. Some underdrawing is visible to the naked eye, especially on the left. Infrared reflectography revealed a loose and rapid underdrawing in which the figures were not included.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. Several minor alterations were made in the paint layer, for instance in the position of the sails of the mill (fig. a). The composition was basically painted from the background to the foreground. A small area was reserved in the background for the house on the left. The paint was applied transparently and thinly, especially in the brown areas, with impasto in the leaves of the tree and some brushstrokes in the sky. The rendering of the landscape is very detailed. The paint was applied more opaquely in the figures, which were painted on top of the background.

Bauch et al. 1972, p. 488; Tjemkes 1982, pp. 12-13; Gifford 1996, p. 74; unpublished lecture by Edwin Buijsen, 29 October 2001

Good. Apart from minor retouchings in the sky, the paint layer is in good condition.

…; 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-3945

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

These circular companion pieces of summer (shown here) and winter (see SK-A-3946), 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. 88.

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. 88

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Jan van Goyen, Summer, 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200109338