Goyen, Jan Van

Dutch landscape painter, born in Leiden. He studied in his native city and in Haarlem with the Dutch artist Esaias van de Velde. In about 1631 Jan van Goyen settled at The Hague, where he became head of the painters' guild in 1640. Van Goyen developed a strongly individual manner of treating his subjects, which emphasized perspective and lighting, suffusing his landscapes in a melancholy gray-green atmosphere. Van Goyen was a pioneer in naturalistic landscape painting in 17th-century Holland; his influence on Dutch painting, exercised principally through his pupils and their contemporaries, was considerable. As the leading practitioner of the "tonal" phase of Dutch landscape painting, Jan van Goyen made the nuances of sky and atmosphere his primary concern. More than a thousand of his oil paintings have been cataloged. Among his better-known paintings are View of Dordrecht (1650, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and View of The Hague (1651), painted at the request of The Hague's authorities and now in its municipal collection.

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