Jan van Goyen

Dutch, 1596–1656

BiographyJan Josephsz van Goyen was born at Leiden on 13 January 1596. From 1606 he studied painting with a series of lesser-known Leiden artists, and with Willem Gerritsz in Hoorn. After traveling in France, van Goyen became a pupil of the landscape painter Esaias van de Velde in Haarlem around 1617. Van Goyen returned to Leiden, where he married Annetje Willemsdr van Raelst in 1618, purchased a house in 1625, and is documented regularly until 1632. In summer 1632 van Goyen moved to The Hague, where he resided until his death on 27 April 1656. Van Goyen served twice as a hoofdman of the Guild of St. Luke in The Hague, in 1638 and 1640. He traveled extensively throughout the Netherlands and Germany, filling numerous sketchbooks with direct and spontaneous studies after nature as well as more finished compositions (compare Oberlin's Houtewael on the Diemerdijk, ca. 1651).3 Although van Goyen was a popular and productive artist, he speculated with remarkably ill success in real estate and tulip bulbs, and died insolvent. Van Goyen had numerous followers, but his only documented pupils are Nicolaes Berchem, Ary (Adriaan) van der Kabel (1630/1-1705), and Jan Steen; his daughter Margarethe married Steen in 1649.

Van Goyen was enormously prolific, producing more than 800 drawings and 1200 paintings. His earliest paintings (from about 1620-26) are close to those of his teacher Esaias van de Velde in their additive compositions and bright accents of local color. From the late 1620s, however, together with the Haarlem painters Pieter de Molyn (1595-1661), Jan Porcellis (ca. 1584-1632), and Salomon van Ruysdael (ca. 1600/3-1670), van Goyen developed a new "tonal" manner of landscape painting, characterized by a diagonally unified compositional structure and a restricted, almost monochromatic palette of tans, browns, and greyish greens. The subject matter of these tonalist landscapes was also somewhat transformed, focusing on unpretentious views of the Dutch countryside laid out beneath towering skies.