Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings.   Related Paintings of Jan van Goyen :. | Peasant Huts with Sweep Well | slottet montfort | A River Scene, with a Hut on an Island. | View of Dordrecht | Hollandische Flachlandschaft. |
Related Artists:
Heinrich Burkel
German, 1802-1869
KONINCK, Philips
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1619-1688 was a Dutch landscape painter.Little is known of his history except that he was said to be a pupil of Rembrandt, whose influence is to be seen in much of his work. He painted chiefly broad, sunny landscapes, full of space, light and atmosphere; they are seen from a high perspective, allowing a prominent view of the sky. Portraits by him, somewhat in the manner of Rembrandt, also exist (e.g. see Joost van den Vondel); there are examples of these in the galleries at Copenhagen and Oslo. Of his landscapes, the principal are View at the mouth of a river at the Hague, with a slightly larger replica in the National Gallery, London; Woodland border and countryside (with figures by Adriaen van de Velde) at Amsterdam; and landscapes in Brussels, Florence (the Uffizi), Berlin and Cologne. Koninck, a prosperous businessman, appears to have painted few pictures during the last decade of his life. Several of his works have been falsely attributed to Rembrandt and many more to his namesake and fellow townsman Salomon de Koninck (1609-1656), also a disciple of Rembrandt, whose paintings and etchings consist mainly of portraits and biblical scenes. Both of these painters are to be distinguished from David Koninck (1636-1687),
Jules Bastien-Lepage
French Realist Painter, 1848-1884 French painter. Bastien-Lepage grew up on a farm. Although his earliest efforts in drawing were encouraged, his parents violently objected when he decided to become a professional artist. To mollify them he worked for a time as a postal clerk in Paris while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1868 he left the civil service and was accepted into Alexandre Cabanel's atelier. During this apprenticeship, Bastien-Lepage won two prizes in drawing, and in 1870 he made his d?but at the Salon with a Portrait of a Young Man (untraced). In the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) he joined a regiment of sharpshooters and was severely wounded in the chest. When he recovered he attempted unsuccessfully to find work as an illustrator.