Circle of Jan van Goyen

'Circle of Jan van Goyen' is how a museum labels a picture painted close to Van Goyen, in his manner and in his time, by someone it cannot name. The label does not claim that Van Goyen touched the picture, or that its painter was his pupil.

A manner like his was easy to share. In the late 1620s Van Goyen, then working in Leiden, and a few Haarlem painters such as Pieter de Molijn began painting small views of rivers, dunes and country roads in a narrow range of browns, greys and greens. The pictures were quick to make and sold well, so many other hands took up the formula, and a great many anonymous panels in this manner survive.

The Mauritshuis in The Hague gives this label to a small panel of a landscape with a bridge, known as The Small Bridge, which it dates, with a question mark, to about 1627 or 1628.