River Landscape with Windmill and Boats

By 1625, when van Goyen signed this river scene, he had not yet found the manner that would make his name. That near-monochrome way of painting, everything washed into browns and greys, was still two or three years off. Here he is working in the busier, more coloured idiom he learned from his teacher Esaias van de Velde: a windmill on the bank, small boats on the water, figures going about an ordinary working day on a Dutch river. Nothing in the scene is grand. He was about 29, painting the flat country he would go on repeating for the rest of his life, before he had thought to strip the colour out of it.