Overview
The Dutch Republic depended on international commerce and shipping for its wealth and power. Whether traveling on the open sea or through the network of rivers and canals that spread across the low-lying Rhine river delta, Dutch ships carried commodities to and from markets at home and abroad. Barges and ferries transported goods and passengers between the numerous towns and villages located along the banks of the inland waterways. Most travelers would approach these urban centers by boat, and depictions of cities viewed from across the water—combining water, ships, and a characteristic skyline—became iconic in Dutch art.
During the 1630s and 1640s, Dutch landscapes entered a monochromatic (or tonal) phase in which a single color pervades and unifies each scene. Jan van Goyen, one of the greatest early landscape artists, was particularly adept at suggesting the various moods of the land in different seasons and weather conditions. The subtle range of ochers and grays, the hovering clouds, and the limpid sails create a tranquil atmosphere. A fisherman works his traps on the left, and a sailboat takes on another traveler. The ferryman in the center foreground has just left his landing and is rowing passengers across the Maas River to Dordrecht.
Entry
On a calm day with an overcast sky, a sailboat stops across from the city of Dordrecht to take on passengers from a rowboat. This sailboat, heavily laden with travelers, served as a ferry, one of a number of types of boats that transported people along the many inland waterways of the Dutch Republic. In the foreground another ferry—a rowboat filled with men, women, and children—heads toward Dordrecht across a wide body of water.
Van Goyen has situated the viewer southwest of Dordrecht on the bank of the Dordtse Kil. The spit of land on the left, on which the fisherman tends to his traps, marks the juncture of the Dordtse Kil with a larger river, the Oude Maas. The sailboat, which is behind this spit of land, is on the Oude Maas at the point where it is joined by the Dordtse Kil and begins to flow west, away from Dordrecht.
Dordrecht was an old and extremely important city in the Dutch Republic. By 1644, when Van Goyen painted this view, it had long since been a major mercantile center. Its importance grew as a result of its favorable geographic situation at the juncture of a number of major inland waterways that connected with the German and southern hinterlands. The conservative character of the city’s rich patrician class was reinforced by the formidable presence of the Dutch Reformed Church that resulted from the victory of the orthodox Calvinists, known as the Counter-Remonstrants, over the more moderate Remonstrants at the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618–1619.
Van Goyen traveled frequently throughout the Netherlands during his long and productive career. On these trips he would fill sketchbooks with scenes that he later expanded into paintings executed in his studio. Working from such sketches he painted more than twenty such views of Dordrecht from the southwest between 1644 and the early 1650s.
This painting comes at the beginning of the series and is exceptional in the extraordinary stillness of the water. Reflections of the boats, buildings, and even the sky create subtle patterns across its surface. Van Goyen suggests the translucency of the water in the immediate foreground by allowing the ocher-colored ground to be visible through the thin brownish
The thinly painted distant view of Dordrecht is conceived in these same terms. The softly undulating tones and suggestive brushwork create the sense that the buildings, rather than being sharply defined solid masses, are enveloped in a misty shroud. This work, however, is not a pure “tonal” painting such as those executed by Van Goyen in the late 1630s and early 1640s; instead, it marks a transition to his later “classical” style. The sky is relatively densely painted, and areas of blue peek through the cloud cover. Touches of local color—blues, reds, and pinks—appear on the clothes of the figures.
Many elements of Dordrecht’s architecture in this painting can be found on contemporary maps. The windmills to the right, the walled bulwark before the Groote Kerk, the ships clustered at the Vuylpoort beyond the bulwark, and the round bastion at the south bank of the Sagerspoort, for example, are all visible on the 1646 bird’s-eye-view map of Dordrecht
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
Inscription
lower center on stern of boat: VGoyen 1644
Provenance
(Eugene Glaenzer, New York and Paris), possibly for (Jacques Seligmann, Paris and New York);[1] sold 1906 to Baron Vladimir de Gunzburg [1873-1932], Paris;[2] by inheritance to his son, Serge de Gunzburg [b. 1911], Geneva;[3] sold 8 February 1978 through (Heim Gallery, Paris) to NGA.
Technical Summary
The support is a thin panel composed of three horizontally grained boards of equal width joined horizontally. The support has been mounted onto another thin panel and cradled, with a slight dislevel along the upper join of the original panel. Paint is applied over a thin off-white ground with low, fine brushmarking, in thin semitransparent darks and thicker opaque lights.[1] The sky, the water, and the trees and buildings along the horizon were rapidly painted in an initial stage working wet-into-wet. In a later stage the primary boats and figures were sketched and painted over the dry paint of the water.
Small amounts of inpaint cover the panel joins, edges, and areas of slight abrasion. In a prior restoration, four undamaged areas in the central sky were overpainted to make the clouds appear denser. The painting has not been treated since its acquisition by the National Gallery of Art.
[1] The pigments were analyzed using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) by the NGA Scientific Research department (see report dated August 4, 1982, in NGA Conservation department files).
Bibliography
- 1981
- Juffermans, Jan. "Han Ulrich Beck—een leven met Jan van Goyen." Tableau 3 (March/April 1981): 594-595, repro.
- 1984
- Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 297, no. 393, color repro.
- 1984
- Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Dutch Painting in the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 1984: 14-15, repro.
- 1985
- National Gallery of Art. European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. Washington, 1985: 185, repro.
- 1986
- Sutton, Peter C. A Guide to Dutch Art in America. Washington and Grand Rapids, 1986: 305.
- 1987
- Beck, Hans-Ulrich. Jan van Goyen, 1596-1656: ein Oeuvreverzeichnis. 4 vols. Vol. 3: Ergänzungen zum Katalog der Handzeichnungen und Ergänzungen zum Katalog der Gemälde. Doornspijk, 1987: 177, no. 296A, repro.
- 1992
- National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art, Washington. New York, 1992: 125, repro.
- 1995
- Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, 1995: 61-64, color repro. 63.
- 2004
- Allen, Eva J. A Vision of Nature: The Landscapes of Philip Koch: Retrospective, 1971-2004. Exh. cat. University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, 2004: 13, fig. 4.
- 2004
- Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 188, no. 147, color repro.
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