An extensive landscape with a cottage and travellers on an open road

The late 1620s were the years in which Jan van Goyen found his stride as a visionary landscape painter. From around 1626, his art changed, going well beyond the example of Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630), who had such a strong influence on his early output. In line with Salomon van Ruysdael in Haarlem, van Goyen pioneered a more truthful, specifically Dutch style of painting, using native subject matter and a more natural, limited palette.
Dating from 1628, the Koenigs painting is an excellent early example of this ‘tonal’ phase, in which the flat, windswept plain of the Dutch landscape is rendered against a cloud filled sky. Van Goyen creates the impression of depth and distance with the sweeping diagonal of the path running around the ramshackle farmstead that anchors the composition.
The artist was a prolific draughtsman, taking sketchbooks into the field to find motifs and develop compositions which he could work up into paintings. A preparatory drawing for the Koenigs picture is preserved in a sketchbook in the British Museum, an album containing 182 drawings made in the countryside around Haarlem in the years around 1627-1635, providing further evidence of the realism that van Goyen was trying to introduce into his paintings at this time (fig. 1; inv. no. 1946,0713.1076.92).
Hans-Ulrich Beck inspected the present work with the father of the present owners in the 1990’s and confirmed the attribution.