Antwerp: Van Goyen Looking Out for a Subject

At the Royal Academy in 1833 Turner hung this beside a Venetian scene in which Canaletto sits painting at the water's edge. He was 58 and had taken to putting dead painters into his own pictures. Here it is the Dutchman Jan van Goyen, who died in 1656, out in a small boat with a sketchbook, hunting a subject. Collectors in Britain were then paying heavily for 17th-century Dutch marine pictures, and Turner was making a quiet argument that he could do that work himself. Van Goyen in fact painted from Leiden and The Hague, and nothing records him sketching at Antwerp. Antwerp's cathedral shows far off on the horizon, a thin spike above the shipping.