Jan Josephszoon van Goyen

Jan Josephszoon van Goyen , 1596-1656, Dutch landscape painter. He studied at Leiden and Haarlem. In 1631 he settled at The Hague. His typically Dutch landscapes of harbors, canals, riverbanks, and winter scenes with skaters and sleighs are naturalistically painted in a grayish-green tonality. He was one of the first landscape painters to sacrifice minute detail for atmospheric effect and space, and he had a considerable influence on later Dutch landscapists. His paintings are in many collections in Europe and the United States. Famous examples are Panorama of The Hague (The Hague); Banks of a Canal (Louvre); and View of Dordrecht (Rijks Mus.). The Metropolitan Museum has five of van Goyen's works, and the Pennsylvania Academy, two.

Goyen, Jan van (b Leiden, 13 Jan. 1596; d The Hague, 27 Apr. 1656). Dutch painter, one of the foremost pioneers of realistic landscape painting in the Netherlands. His earliest works are heavily indebted to his master Esaias van de Velde, but he then created a distinctive type of monochrome landscape in browns and greys with touches of vivid blue or red to catch the eye. He was one of the first painters to capture the quality of the light and air in a scene and to suggest the movement of clouds. Most of his paintings seem to be based on drawings made as he travelled about the countryside, and he evidently used the same drawings again and again because the same themes and motifs recur repeatedly in his works: gnarled oaks, wide plains, usually seen from a height, low horizons, and clouded skies are typical of his repertoire. His finest work has a sense of poetic calm as well as great freshness and luminosity of atmosphere. Van Goyen worked in Leiden, Haarlem, and The Hague. He was hugely prolific and had many pupils and imitators. With Salomon van Ruysdael, whose paintings are often virtually indistinguishable from his, he was the outstanding master of the ‘tonal’ phase of Dutch landscape painting, when the depiction of atmosphere was the artist's prime concern.