River View with Church and Farmhouse

By 1653 Jan van Goyen had lived in The Hague for about 20 years, and he had a way of building a river view that he could set down quickly and repeat almost at will. The Mauritshuis reads the recipe straight off this small panel. A dark foreground, a bank running diagonally into the distance, a hazy horizon. Here the dark note is a rowboat, a black silhouette close to us, and it is what pushes everything else back. On the far bank sits a village with a tall church tower and a tall haystack beside it. The rest is water and sky in browns and greys. Van Goyen signed on the boat itself, his joined initials VG and the year. The panel surfaced at a London sale in 1985 and came to the museum in 1994, a gift from the American Friends of the Mauritshuis.