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Jan van Goyen (Leiden 1596 - The Hague 1656) |
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| A Village on the Banks of a Canal with Cattle and Fishermen
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signed with initials and dated ‘VG 1652’
black chalk, grey wash, pen and brown ink framing lines, watermark foolscap
11.3 x 19.2 cm (4½ x 7½ in)
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Provenance
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E. Cichorius; C.G. Boerner, Leipzig, 5 May 1908, lot 535, (sold before the sale).
O. Huldschinsky; Berlin, 3 November 1931, lot 46a (130 Marks).
with Galerie Rosen, Berlin, 1962.
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Literature
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H.-U. Beck, Jan van Goyen 1596-1656, Ein Oeuvreverzeichnis, I, Amsterdam, 1972, p. 108, no. 304b.
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Full Expertise:
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Jan van Goyen was an accomplished draughtsman as well as painter, and his drawings are testament to his capabilities. He travelled widely throughout the Netherlands recording details of landscape, topography and everyday life in chalk, wash and ink sketches, filling many sketchbooks with his daily observations. Though primarily a landscape artist, van Goyen frequently animated the composition with genre scenes of everyday life, and painted many of the canals in and around The Hague as well as the villages surrounding the countryside of Delft, Rotterdam, Leiden and Gouda. After compiling these preparatory sketches in situ, of which the present drawing, A Village on the Banks of a Canal with Cattle and Fisherman, is a charming example, he used them to form and shape the final painting carried out in the studio. Drawings survive for every year of van Goyen’s creative life, and he was particularly prolific from 1631 to 1653. Indeed, of his surviving body of work approximately 1,200 paintings are documented.
Van Goyen was born in Leiden, the son of a shoemaker who, reportedly, from the tender age of ten was apprenticed to several artists before training for a year, in 1617, with Esaias van der Velde in Haarlem. In 1632, at age thirty five, he established a permanent studio in The Hague. There two years later he acquired rights of citizenship and served as head of the Guild of St. Luke (1638-40). An artist with business acumen, van Goyen recognised that income gained solely from his artistic output was insufficient, and intermittently worked as an art dealer and collector, auctioneer, estate agent and picture valuer to further his prosperity. He lost a great deal of money when he speculated in tulips in 1637, at the height of ‘tulip mania’ when contract prices for bulbs of the newly introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed. At the peak of this tulip mania, in February 1637, tulip contracts sold for more than 20 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble. Despite being a prolific artist, he was unable to cover his debts and in 1652 and 1654 he was forced to sell his possessions at public auction, and subsequently moved to a smaller house. He died in 1656 sadly still heavily in debt, forcing his widow to sell all their remaining assets including their home.
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