Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 112

Jan van Goyen (Dutch: 1596-1656).

Jan van Goyen, one of the first masters in the native Dutch art of landscape as opposed to the exotic work of the Italianisers, was born at Leyden in 1596. He studied with the elder Swanenburch, the father of Rembrandt's first master, and subsequently went to Haarlem to work under Esaias van de Velde. His position in the world of art was considerable. In 1640 he was President of the Guild of St. Luke at the Hague; his portrait was painted by Vandyck and Frans Hals; and Jan Steen was his son-in-law. His earlier extant pictures date from 1621, his latest go down to the year of his death. His production during this period of thirty-five years was immense; "a single London expert claims to have had at least three or four hundred genuine pictures by the master passing through his hands during the last thirty years." Like so many of the Dutch masters whose works are now prized, he received in his lifetime very small sums for his pictures – often not more than fifteen or twenty florins apiece. He tried to help his income by speculating in houses, and even, after the fashion of the time, in tulips. But he died insolvent. His work, however, and influence remained. His extant pictures are very numerous; and among the successors whose skill was largely formed by him are Cuyp, Jan van de Cappelle, and Salomon Ruysdael. "The subjects which he preferred were of two kinds: flat landscapes with a little broken ground in the front, a cottage, the figures of a few peasants, and a clump of trees; or, on the other hand, – and these are his best and most characteristic productions – broad views of the river scenery of Holland, a wide expanse of water under a wide sky." He was one of the first to discover a poetry in the unbroken horizons of his native land. "Where he is at his best is in the painting of the infinitely varied sky that overhangs a great Dutch river or estuary, the clouds taking at every movement new shapes or new effects of light and shade, and the water below reflecting them" (see an article on "The Landscape Painters of Holland" in The Quarterly Review, October 1891). In order to give his favourite effects, he generally placed the skyline very low in the picture, sometimes not more than a quarter of the canvas being given to the landscape. Van Goyen aimed rather at tone than at colour. "His silvery river-views, with all their delicate shades of grey, are almost studies in monochrome." In his landscapes the foliage and the herbage partake more or less of brown or gray. "No heavy, dark, no bright colour disturbs," says Sir F. Burton, "the dreamy monotone."

This work was formerly ascribed to J. Ruysdael.