This supreme production, created by van Goyen only two years before his death, shows the artist at the very summit of his powers. The painting epitomises the artist’s talent for creating magnificent atmospheric effects. His qualities as a narrator are manifest as well. Van Goyen imbued this river scene with a sense of restrained drama by including people working in the foreground under dark clouds that fill the sky, forecasting bad weather. These qualities have earned van Goyen the title of one of the greatest landscapists of all time. It was exactly his poetic vision through sensitive observation of the Dutch landscape, such as demonstrated in our painting, combined with the loose, virtuoso handling of the brush, that prepared the artist’s real rediscovery by the Paris dealer Charles Sedelmeyer at the end of the nineteenth century.

Although scenes such as the present are traditionally described as estuary scenes, this is maybe more likely to depict a scene on one of the large Dutch inland lakes. The painting is partly based, as Hans-Ulrich Beck noted, on one of the last sheets from Van Goyen’s Dresdener sketchbook of around 1648 (see literature). The earlier drawings in this book record sites on a journey south to Brussels and then north again to the artist’s home in The Hague. The drawing relevant to our picture probably records one of the lakes near Leiden, or the shore of the Haarlemmermeer.

Our painting was owned by the English painter, engraver and art dealer Thomas Patch, who was mostly active in Italy, first in Rome and then in Florence. In Italy Patch painted views on popular sights which were visited by young English nobles on their Grand Tour. He also painted caricature groups of English visitors in Italian galleries and portraits. In the 1960s and 1970s, our picture was in the famous Girardet collection, in Kettwig/Essen, Germany. Dr Herbert Girardet led a family business, a publishing house, and was one of the greatest collectors of Dutch Old Masters of the past generation. In 1970, a superb exhibition of Girardet’s collection was shown in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne and then travelled to Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen.

Jan van Goyen was the son of a Leiden shoemaker. He had numerous teachers. According to Jan Orlers who wrote a chronicle of Leiden in 1641, he studied in that city with the glass painters Coenraet van Schilperoort, Isaac van Swanenburgh, Jan Arentsz de Man, Hendrick Clock and thereafter in Hoorn with Willem Gerritsz. He remained a year in France (1615/16) and subsequently finished his education in the Haarlem studio of Esaias van de Velde. Of all tutors the latter had by far the most decisive influence on Van Goyen’s early landscapes. In 1618, he settled in Leiden where he married Anna Willemsdr van Raelst in the same year. In 1632, he moved to The Hague, where he received citizenship two years later. He lived at various locations in the city, at one time having the painters Johannes Schoeff and Paulus Potter as his neighbours. Van Goyen was a prolific artist of whom more than 1200 pictures and no less than 800 drawings are known. Despite his enormous output, the artist was constantly in financial difficulty which he tried to overcome by art dealing, realty and appraising, but to no avail. Arnold Houbraken reports that Jan Steen, Nicolaes Berchem and Adriaen van der Cabel were among his pupils. However, other artists were profoundly influenced by his works; among them Anthony van der Croos, Jacob Moscher and Cornelis van der Schalcke.