Antique 17th Century Large Dutch Old Master Oil on Panel Landscape Painting by Jan Josefsz Van Goyen 1650

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A highly important Dutch Old Master Landscape Oil Painting on Panel by Jan Josefsz Van Goyen (1596-1656), the painting circa … Read more A highly important Dutch Old Master Landscape Oil Painting on Panel by Jan Josefsz Van Goyen (1596-1656), the painting circa 1650.
The painting from the Dutch Gold Age depicts a bustling figurative landscape, with figures on horseback and a dog to the foreground with many other groups of figures, to the highground is a church and other buildings. To the center of the painting is a larger group of figures, with many sailing boats tto the background, below an evening sunset sky.
The painting is in very good condition, it was professionally conserved & cleaned five years ago, the painting is housed in a contemporary Dutch ripple style frame with a gilded border.
Provenance; From an important European family collection.

Jan Josefsz Van Goyen was a Dutch landscape painter. The scope of his work was very broad including; marine paintings, river landscapes, beach scenes, winter landscapes, cityscapes, architectural views and landscapes with peasants. He wass an extremely prolific artist who left at least twelve hundred paintings.
Jan van Goyen was the son of a shoemaker and started as an apprentice in Leiden, the town of his birth. Like many Dutch painters of his time, he studied art in the town of Haarlem with Esaias van de Velde. At age 35, he established a permanent studio at The Hague
He always sought more income, as an art dealer and auctioneer but also by speculating in tulips (he was the last known victim of the tulip mania of the 1630s) and real estate. Although the latter was usually a safe avenue of investing money, in van Goyen's experience it led to enormous debts. Paulus Potter rented one of his houses. Though he seems to have kept a workshop, his only registered pupils were Nicolaes van Berchem, Jan Steen, and Adriaen van der Kabel. The list of painters he influenced is much longer.
In 1652 and 1654, he was forced to sell his collection of paintings he subsequently moved to a smaller house. He died in 1656 in The Hague, unbelievably 18,000 guilders in debt, forcing his widow to sell their remaining furniture and paintings.
Jan van Goyen would be classified primarily as a landscape artist with an eye for the genre subjects of everyday life. He painted many of the canals in and around The Hague as well as the villages surrounding the countryside of Delft, Rotterdam, Leiden, and Gouda.
Jan van Goyen would begin a painting using a support primarily of thin oak wood. To this panel, he would scrub on several layers of a thin animal hide glue. With a blade, he would then scrape over the entire surface a thin layer of tinted white lead to act as a ground and to fill the low areas of the panel. The ground was tinted light brown, sometimes reddish, or ochre in colour.
Next, he would rapidly sketch out the scene to be painted with pen and ink without the small details of his subject. This walnut ink drawing can be clearly seen in some of the thinly painted areas of his work. The scene would have been drawn from life outdoors and then kept in the studio as reference material.
On his palette he would grind out a colour collection of neutral grays, umbers, ochre and earthen greens that looked like they were pulled from the very soil he painted. A varnish oil medium was used as vehicle to grind his powdered pigments into paint and then used to help apply thin layers of paint which he could easily blend.
According to the art historian H. U. Beck, "In his freely composed seascapes of the 1650s he reached the apex of his creative work, producing paintings of striking perfection."

43" x 30" See less