Old Masters Day Sale, including portrait miniatures
Old Masters Day Sale, including portrait miniatures
The Property of a Lady
Jan Josefsz. van Goyen
A view of The Hague from the south-east, seen from across a canal, with a trekschuit to the left, a windmill in the centre, and a merry company in a rowingboat in the foreground
Lot Closed
December 8, 02:48 PM GMT
Estimate
20,000 - 30,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
The Property of a Lady
Jan Josefsz. van Goyen
Leiden 1596 - 1656 The Hague
A view of The Hague from the south-east, seen from across a canal, with a trekschuit to the left, a windmill in the centre, and a merry company in a rowingboat in the foreground
signed in monogram and indistinctly dated on the boat in the centre foreground: VG .6.6 (or 56)
oil on oak panel
unframed: 42.9 x 56.6 cm.; 16⅞ x 22¼ in.
framed: 59.5 x 74.5 cm.; 23⅜ x 29⅜ in.
Thence by descent at Blithfield to Gerald Bagot, 5th Baron Bagot;
From whose Settled Estate sold, London, Sotheby's, 17 October 1945, lot 87, to Agnew's;
With Thomas Agnew & Sons, London;
From whom acquired by Sir Malcolm Robertson on 20 November 1946, for £1,200;
Thence by descent to the present owner, his granddaughter (by whom offered London, Sotheby's, 8 July 1999, lot 10, estimate £100,000–150,000, unsold).
This picture is closely related to two other late works by the artist, both of which remain untraced.1 These two paintings, which date from 1652, show The Hague from the same point, with a canal in the foreground, and a trekschuit to the left of a large windmill on the far bank. The description of cat. no. 330 in Beck's catalogue (which is unillustrated) matches the present picture in all but minor details; the measurements, if correctly given, are sufficiently different to preclude their being one and the same picture.
The skyline of The Hague is accurately depicted as seen from the south-east, with the Grote Kerk with its distinctive raised choir prominent to the left. To its left, at the edge of the picture is the tower of Het Huis van Assendelt, and to its right is the Oude Stadhuis on the Groenmarkt. To the right of the windmill are the humped roofs of the Oude Hof and Nordeinde, the Stadhouderlijk Kwartier of the Buitenhof and the long bulk of the Ridderzaal of the Binnenhof. The foreground is a capriccio view of the Deltse Vaart, the canal along which the passenger ferry (Trekschuit) travelled between The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam. One such vessel is depicted here. The windmill with its sails set to face the prevailing south-westerly breeze is probably De Laakmolen, which stood on the west bank of the canal.
This painting is broadly similar to Van Goyen's celebrated panorama of The Hague, by some margin his largest picture, commissioned in 1651, which now hangs in the Haags Historisch Museum.2
When offered in 1999 a saleroom notice recorded that Dr Hans-Ulrich Beck had confirmed Van Goyen's authorship of this picture and intended to include it in a planned (but never published) second supplement to his Van Goyen catalogue raisonné.
In the Appendix to Thomas Pennant's The Journey from Chester to London published in 1782, two Van Goyens are listed as at Blithfield Hall, and are next recorded in R. Richard's catalogue of the pictures at Blithfield of 1801, but without precise descriptions in either case. These are highly likely to have been two of the three Van Goyens, including the present one, which were sold as consecutive lots in the Bagot sale in 1945, where it was stated that ‘the majority of the pictures catalogued below were collected by the 1st Lord Bagot (William, 6th Bart.), 1728–1798’.
1 H.-U. Beck, Jan van Goyen 1596–1656, vol II, Katalog der Gemälde, Amsterdam 1973, p. 162, nos 329 and 330.
2 C. Dumas, Haagse Stadsgezichten, exh. cat., Zwolle 1991, pp. 509–17, no. 41 reproduced.