Jan van Goyen, Fishermen on the beach at Scheveningen

Lot description

Monogrammed and dated lower left: VG 1641 This detailed view of Scheveningen beach on the North Sea coast near The Hague is a characteristic painting from the late period of Jan van Goyen’s career. It shows freshly caught fish being carried from the water in the background to the vendors on the beach in the left-hand foreground, who are selling the fresh catch. In the background, the Oude Kerk of Scheveningen stands out against the backdrop of clouds as a landmark. Like many towns along the Dutch North Sea coast, Scheveningen has no harbour due to its long, flat beach, and the catch was brought ashore from the sea in smaller boats. Jan van Goyen had moved from Leiden to The Hague with his wife and daughters in 1632, and the beach at Scheveningen soon became one of his favourite subjects. A comparable, slightly smaller composition, also dated 1642, is now in the Collectie Nederland in Amsterdam (inv. NK 1508, Beck op, cit. No. 939). A distinctive feature of van Goyen’s works from the 1640s is their greatly reduced colour palette: he used ochre, brown and olive for the landscape, and grey, white and a touch of blue for the sky, which usually occupies a larger area in his compositions, —a stylistic device with which van Goyen further emphasises the flat Dutch coastal landscape in his paintings. After almost 150 years, this painting is once again being auctioned at Lempertz in Cologne.