Jan van Goyen

Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), Dutch landscape painter, born in Leiden. He studied in his native city and in Haarlem with Esaias van de Velde. In about 1631 van Goyen settled at The Hague, where he became head of the painters' guild in 1640. Van Goyen developed a strongly individual manner of treating his subjects, which emphasized perspective and lighting, suffusing his landscapes in a melancholy grey-green atmosphere. Van Goyen was a pioneer in naturalistic landscape painting in 17th-century Holland; his influence on Dutch painting, exercised principally through his pupils and their contemporaries, was considerable. As the leading practitioner of the “tonal” phase of Dutch landscape painting, van Goyen made the nuances of sky and atmosphere his primary concern. More than a thousand of his paintings have been catalogued. Among his better-known paintings are View of Dordrecht (1650, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and View of The Hague (1651), painted at the request of The Hague's authorities and now in its municipal collection.