Newsletter - Spring 2003
Interview

Van Goyen Enriches Museum

Estuary with a Fishing Boat Jan van Goyen

Director Marianne Doezema and John Varriano, Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art, discuss View of an Estuary with a Fishing Boat by Jan van Goyen, a recent museum acquisition.

MD: During the lengthy process of considering this acquisition, the dealer shipped the painting to the museum, so we could see it in the context of other paintings from the collection that are installed here in the Cary Gallery. How have your thoughts about View of an Estuary with a Fishing Boat developed during this period?

JV: Seeing the painting hanging here makes it even clearer that this work exemplifies a vision of landscape that was not well represented in the museum's collection until now. With few exceptions -- like our clear-headed Daubigny -- this canvas stands out among other landscapes in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum for its straightforward "realism," seemingly unaffected by nostalgic human sentiment or literary allusion.

MD: Explain more specifically the way that Jan Both's Italian Landscape with Travelers, hanging here with the van Goyen, is rightly seen in terms of literary associations.

JV: Well, Both's view is plainly in the tradition of the pastoral landscape, conceived in Italy by the Frenchman Claude Lorrain a decade or so earlier. Claude's own sources were as much literary as visual, reviving the arcadian theme celebrated by classical poets since the time of Virgil. This vision of nature, which conjures a mythical golden age, was one that deeply affected artists from the north, evident on this same wall in the landscape by Both's pupil Willem de Heusch—who was also from Utrecht—and the later neo-classical picture by the Frenchman Valenciennes. The Dutch lowlands, needless to say, were flat and usually far less sunny. For local audiences, the pictures by Both, de Heusch, and Valenciennes therefore represented imaginary places and imaginary states of mind.

MD: As well as convention.

JV: Yes, by comparison, the van Goyen seems so strikingly unconventional. First of all, it abandons the conventions of northern landscape itself, the kind of wild and adversarial nature one sees in the background of earlier pictures like the Joos van Cleve Holy Family that is on long-term loan to the museum, and later even in the moody landscapes of Rembrandt. But it is just as indifferent to the fashions of the Italianate landscape, the idealism of the Carracci, the romanticism of Salvator Rosa, and, of course, the arcadianism of Claude. Seventeenth-century empiricism is the only cultural context that can be evoked here.

MD: Having described the van Goyen as relatively unconventional, I presume you are suggesting that it represents a new level of realism.

JV: The "realism" of Dutch art is certainly problematic, and that is one of the main issues I address when teaching this material. On the one hand, there is the traditional view that all Dutch painting is but a "slice of life," a mere transcription of reality. But another school argues that the same images convey elaborately coded emblematic messages.

MD: Seeing it as a pure genre scene, it illustrates quite beautifully aspects of a fisherman's daily life.

JV: The composition is so unheroic and undramatic that any more elaborate message would have had to be a very subtle one. I really don't think there's any conventional iconography here—and that's one of van Goyen's innovations—but there are broad reflections of the Dutch character and temperament to be sure. Painting the coastline would itself have been a natural act in a young nation whose very survival depended upon the sea. Their foreign trade and their political security were inextricably linked to it.

MD: The picture also illustrates the emphatic flatness of the landscape, and in the middle distance, we see two windmills, which have become virtual icons of the Dutch land and way of life.

JV: Another of Van Goyen's innovations as a landscape painter is to lower the horizon and paint what is, in effect, a skyscape. At this point in his career—the work is dated 1641—he tended to structure his compositions in terms of alternating bands of light and dark, arranged more or less in parallel planes. Unlike so many of our other landscapes—think of our Bierstadt, for example—there are no forceful diagonals or strong coloristic contrasts to dramatize the scene. Although painted in the Baroque period, the subdued visual language and reticent mood of the picture seems deliberately anti-baroque, and for its primary audience, that would have constituted another novel aspect of its realism.

MD: The modulations of tone are incredibly subtle. If you look at this as a demonstration of what an artist can create on a small surface, working with a very limited range of hues, it's a tour de force.

Estuary with a Fishing Boat (detail) Jan van Goyen

JV: The limited range of color and free, impressionistic brushwork in the picture were both quite innovative. One scholar, an economic historian, has even suggested that van Goyen's "tonalism" was spurred by a desire to reduce the costs of production in the over-supplied Dutch art market of his time. Colorful and finely painted pictures cost more to produce and van Goyen, who supplemented his meager income as a landscape painter by trading in works of art, may well have painted with such considerations in mind. Using a greyish palette that avoided expensive pigments while at the same time painting quickly would have been an effective means of saving money. Because the Dutch art market was so competitive and specialized, he may also have conceived these monochromatic and impressionistic landscapes as a way of creating his own artistic niche. But whatever his motivation, our little picture represents a crucial and fascinating moment in his career. Since there is already a full scholarly monograph on van Goyen in which this work is published, our students will be able to investigate some of the matters we've just discussed for themselves, and that, I think, should be a primary goal of any acquisition we make.