Jan van Goyen (Leiden 1596 – 1656 The Hague)

A view of Dordrecht from the northeast

signed and dated lower center: V. Goyen 1647
oil on canvas
37 ¼ x 57 ½ inches (94.6 x 146 cm.)

Provenance:
Martin H Colnaghi, London, by 1895;
Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris, by 1895;
by whom sold in 1896 to the William P Wilstach Collection, Philadelphia;
Wilstach Collection sale, Freemans, Philadelphia, 29 October 1954, lot 196;
JN Streep, New York;
Sotheby’s London, 4 July 1956, lot 74 (£2,400 to Askew);
Dr Hans A Wetzlar Collection, Amsterdam;
H Shickman Gallery, New York, 1969;
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, TX, 1979-2008.

Exhibited:
London, Royal Academy, Old Masters, no.72 (‘Dort’, lent by MH Colnaghi);
Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts, La découverte de la lumière, 1959, no.73, illus. (lent by Dr Wetzlar);
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, Zee en Rivier en Oevergezichten, 1964, no.38, illus.;
Bath, Assembly Rooms, International Treasures (1000-years’ Celebration of the British Monarchy), 1973;
Longview, TX, Longview Museum and Arts Center, 1981;
McAllen International Museum, TX, 1984;
Corpus Christi, TX, Weil Gallery, 1984;
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Museum of Art, 1984;
Abilene, TX, Abilene Christian University, 1985;
Dallas, TX, Meadows Museum, 1989;
Melbourne, FL, Brevard Art Center and Museum, 1991;
Williamsburg, VA, Muscarelle Museum of Art, 1993;
Odessa, TX, Ellen Noel Museum of Art, 2003;

Literature:
Charles Sedelmeyer, Illustrated Catalogue of the Eighth Series of 100 Paintings by Old Masters of the Dutch, Flemish, Italian, French and English Schools, Paris 1902;
Wilstach Museum Philadelphia, Catalogue, 1907, no.125;
Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. VIII, London 1927, p.27, no.53;
Hans-Ulrich Beck, Jan van Goyen 1596-1656, vol. II, Amsterdam 1972-3, p.150, no.306, illus.;  
Christopher Wright, A Golden Age of Painting: Dutch, Flemish, German Paintings, Sixteeenth-Seventeenth Centuries, San Antonio 1981, pp.148-150;
Katherine T. Brown, “Baroque Landscape Painting: The Domain of Light” in Masterpieces of Baroque Painting from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation exhibition catalogue, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1992, plate 27, p. 39.

Jan van Goyen was a prolific painter and draughtsman whose career spanned more than thirty-five years. During his early life he was influenced by Esaias van de Velde, the first Dutch painter to abandon the mannerisms of the Flemish style in favor of more naturalistic landscape views. He then began to paint in the new Haarlem landscape idiom, distinguished by its atmospheric quality and monochromatic palette, richly varied in tone. Van Goyen, Pieter de Molijn and Salomon van Ruysdael were the principal exponents of this style.

Van Goyen was born in Leiden in 1596 and from 1606 was the pupil successively of the Leiden painters Coenraet van Schilperoort, Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburgh, Jan Arentsz. de Man and the glass-painter Cornelis Cornelisz. Clock.  He then studied for two years with Willem Gerritsz. at Hoorn. Van Goyen went back to Leiden and worked on his own; at the age of about nineteen he traveled in France for a year and from 1617-18 he was the pupil of Esaias van de Velde in Haarlem. Van de Velde strongly influenced the style of van Goyen’s early paintings from 1620 to 1626.

Van Goyen went to The Hague in 1632, where he acquired citizenship in 1634.  During that same year he worked in Haarlem, painting in the house of Isaac van Ruysdael, the brother of Salomon. He was a hoofdman of The Hague Guild in 1638 and 1640, and in 1651 he painted for the Burgomasters’ Room in The Hague Town Hall a panoramic view of the town, for which he received 650 guilders. Despite his astounding rate of production, van Goyen was constantly beset with financial difficulties; he incurred great losses in the ‘tulipmania’ of 1636-7 and died insolvent.

The work of Jan van Goyen is represented in the National Gallery, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Louvre, Paris; the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The artist spent his early life in Leiden and Haarlem before settling in The Hague in 1632. He was a restless man, traveling the length of the northern Netherlands and recording ever-changing nature in vibrant, rapid sketches. Many of his oil paintings are quite small, but this imposing View of Dordrecht from the north-east shows how brilliantly he could translate his sensitivity to nature and innate elegance of composition onto a grand scale.

Dordrecht, about twenty miles south-east from van Goyen’s base in The Hague, was a favorite subject with the artist: he painted over thirty views of the town between 1633 and 1655. Situated at the junction of the Maas, Waal and Rhine, commanding trade routes leading east, north and south into Belgium, Dordrecht was Holland’s centre of power by 1015. It is the oldest incorporated city in the Netherlands, having been granted a charter in 1220 by William I, Count of Holland. By the sixteenth century Dordrecht was rich from shipbuilding and trade in wood, wine and cereals. In 1572 representatives from Holland’s cities gathered there to declare their independence from Spain and to acknowledge William of Orange as their leader, sparking the Eighty Years’ War. Although Dordrecht had lost importance to Amsterdam and Rotterdam by van Goyen’s day, it nurtured a rich artistic life, with Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680), Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691), Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), Nicolas Maes (1634-1693) and Godfried Schalken (1643-1706) all sons of the city. 

As Dr Hans-Ulrich Beck points out,¹ this is van Goyen’s only close-up view of Dordrecht from the north-east. Dominating the scene are the town’s defensive bastions and the Grote Kerk (1460-1502) with its massive, truncated tower and four-faced clock, little changed today. To the right of the church is one of the city gates. A stiff breeze has whipped up the Maas into choppy peaks known as golfslag. Passengers in the foreground ferry, hunkered down against the wind, are all too familiar with this uncomfortable form of transport. 

Van Goyen employs a palette of greens, browns and an infinitely subtle range of creams and greys to convey the special nature of his windy and watery homeland. A magnificent procession of clouds streams grandly across the sky from left to right, breaking here and there to allow a glimpse of sunlight and blue sky. Dordrecht is framed between the elements of air and water; the sails of the windmills going round and the boats’ sails bellying in the breeze add to the sense of animation.
 
Van Goyen signed this painting in 1647, the penultimate decade of his life. By that stage he was at the height of his powers, a master of composition and observation of natural effects. In contrast with his strict ‘tonal’ phase of the 1630s and early 1640s, he employs a more varied and naturalistic palette in his vivid evocation of Dordrecht.   
 
Like many of van Goyen’s works, the View of Dordrecht was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, when artists like Boudin were turning their attention to fleeting effects of nature and van Goyen’s instinctive, painterly style came to be re-appreciated. By 1895 the painting was with the Paris dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, who is credited with the popularization of van Goyen in France. The following year it was sold to the William P Wilstach Collection, begun by the Philadelphia merchant William P Wilstach (1816-1870) and continued by his widow. The Wilstachs were major benefactors to Philadelphia Museum of Art, both in terms of works donated and money to fund further acquisitions. View of Dordrecht was later in the Amsterdam collection of Dr Hans A Wetzlar, who built up one of the finest groups of seventeenth century Dutch paintings amassed in the mid-twentieth century.  
 
In 1979 A view of Dordrecht was acquired by the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, TX. Sarah Campbell Blaffer (1885-1975) was inspired to collect European art after visiting the Louvre on her wedding trip to Paris in 1909. The Foundation set up after her death was charged with collecting paintings that illustrate the development of European art from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, for the benefit of the people of Texas. Apart from this very fine van Goyen, deaccessioned in 2008, it has acquired works by Rubens, van Dyck, Veronese, Chardin and Gainsborough, among other painters.