ON VIEW

Description

Depicted in this painting is an imposing stone building punctuated by a variety of protruding towers and crow-stepped gables. The building overlooks a low-lying river with a distant horizon where only a thin strip of land separates water from sky. In the immediate foreground is a riverbank on which fishermen wrestle with nets cast into the water. On the river, rowboats and a ferry filled with passengers and livestock occupy a small inlet near the building. There are sailboats in the distance, as well as a small windmill on the far right. The nearly monochromatic palette, made up largely of browns and yellows, softens the contours of the forms, giving the atmosphere a hazy appearance.

Context and Analysis

This panel painting, which depicts Fort Lillo on the River Scheldt in the Netherlands, is the work of Jan van Goyen, a Dutch artist of the 1600s. During the Dutch revolt against Spain, Fort Lillo was of great military importance due to its location near the Spanish-controlled city of Antwerp. After securing the Scheldt, the Dutch were able to profit by diverting much of Antwerp’s maritime trade to cities in the Northern Netherlands.

Portraying specific sites like this one was not unusual for Van Goyen, who traveled extensively throughout the Dutch Republic over the course of his career, sketching the landscape. Upon returning to the studio, he used the sketches to create paintings with identifiable landmarks, such as the present work. He often amended details of the terrain in order to enrich his compositions. Innovative in subject matter, Van Goyen’s landscapes were also groundbreaking in technique. In the late 1620s and 1630s, he began producing scenes with reduced palettes of primarily browns and grays, called “tonal landscapes.” These works, heavily dominated by water and air, captured the coastal topography of the Netherlands. Painting in this mode, Van Goyen was able to achieve great speed in his working process. As a result he became highly prolific, creating more than 1,200 paintings. His works appealed to sophisticated connoisseurs in Dutch cities, who had access to numerous and diverse landscape paintings in this period. The booming art market forced artists like Van Goyen to innovate constantly. This painting departs from his most minimal dune and river landscapes, by enhancing the monumentality of the fort in contrast to the surrounding lowlands.

Connections

Van Goyen’s painting can be compared to Liz Nofziger’s video Chocorua in the Currier’s collection (Currier, 2011.22 ). Like Van Goyen, Nofziger explores the close relationship between water and air in her work. The uniform palette, as well as the reflection of the sky and mountain in the water below, creates a similar intermingling of the elements. Nofziger also chose to represent an identifiable place, in this case Chocorua in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. This specificity gives viewers from New England the same sense of locality that a Dutch viewer in the 1600s would have had encountering Van Goyen’s work.


Written by Elizabeth A. Nogrady

Bibliography

Sluijter, Eric Jan. “On Brabant Rubbish, Economic Competition, Artistic Rivalry, and the Growth of the Market for Paintings in the First Decades of the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 1, no. 2 (2009).

Stechow, Wolfgang. Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century. London: Phaidon, 1968.

Sutton, Peter C. Masters of 17th-century Dutch Landscape Painting. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987.