A Farm in a Wooded Landscape
A Farm in a Wooded Landscape (1630)
Oil on panel
Jan van Goyen
Jan Josephsz van Goyen (1596-1656) was one of the outstanding pioneers of naturalistic landscape painting in early 17th-century Holland. Born at Leiden, he trained in Haarlem with Esaias van de Velde. During the 1630s and 1640s, he moved between Leiden, Haarlem and The Hague, where he chiefly worked until his death.
Van Goyen’s many drawings show that he travelled extensively in Holland and beyond. He was a supreme technician, and his gentle, assured river and estuary scenes are some of the finest of all Dutch 17th century landscape painting.
Around 1630, van Goyen became interested in depicting seemingly tranquil landscapes, peopled with only a few figures. He deliberately chose modest scenes, often river landscapes with wooden bridges or dilapidated farm buildings.
Dutch painters such as Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael worked on a relatively small scale, yet they exerted considerable influence on generations of later landscape painters. Their depictions of the low-lying Dutch countryside, and the unremarkable ordinariness of rural life, evoke a timeless quality and poetic response to nature that had a profound influence on the British and French Romantic tradition.
During the later 18th, and throughout the 19th century, it was to paintings such as this and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Cornfield that Constable in Britain and Courbet, Millet and Corot in France looked for inspiration, and their work in turn influenced French Impressionism. It is the revolutionary quality, therefore, of this small, quiet landscape, combined with its gentle charm, that make it so vital an acquisition.
A Farm in a Wooded Landscape is an excellent example of van Goyen’s preference for a simple, unremarkable landscape, which he elevates into a painting of supreme beauty through his sensitive treatment of natural detail and the atmospheric effects of light and sky.
Purchased in 2024 with the assistance of the Esmé Mitchell Trust