Jan Josefsz. van Goyen

With Johnson Neale, the album bought on the Continent in the 19th Century;

T. Mark Hovell, F.R.I.C.S., London;

anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 3 July 1918, lot 124 (the entire album);

with P. and D. Colnaghi & Co., London;

A.W.M. Mensing, Amsterdam,

his sale, Amsterdam, Mensing/Muller, 27 April 1937, lot 218 (the entire album);

A. Mayer, The Hague and New York;

Dr. Karl Lilienfeld, New York, by 1957 (by whom the album dismembered);

Frederick Mont, New York, by 1964,

thence by descent,

sale, New York, Christie's, 28 January 2020, lot 61

H.-U. Beck, Jan van Goyen 1596-1656, Amsterdam 1972, vol. I, p. 306, no. 847/159

This drawing originates from a sketchbook used by Van Goyen during the course of a journey he made in 1650-51 from his hometown of Leiden to the German border around Nijmegen, Kleve and Arnhem, before returning to Amsterdam and the surrounding area. In common with many Dutch landscape artists of the 17th century, Van Goyen made a number of sketching tours, although he did not stray as far from home as some of his contemporaries and the journey of 1650-51 appears to have been one of the most extensive that he undertook. During his travels, Van Goyen filled several sketchbooks with rapid studies of landscapes such as this, as well as buildings, animals and figures, which he then used as the basis for elements in his oil paintings and also in his more elaborate, finished drawings, composed and executed in the studio. Though hardly mountainous by the standards of some other nations, the hills of the lower Rhine region where this drawing was made must have seemed rather exotic to a native of the polders and canals of Holland. It cannot now be ascertained how many sheets the sketchbook of 1650-51 originally contained. Up to 190 sheets remained in the album at the time of the 1937 sale, but others must have been removed prior to that date, and the counting of the sheets seems in any case not to have been precisely undertaken (at the time of the 1918 sale, Campbell Dodgson, who first published the sketchbook¹, gave the number of sheets as only 179). In any case, those remaining together in 1937 were separated by Dr. Lilienfeld after he acquired them in 1957.

¹Campbell Dodgson, 'A Dutch Sketch-book of 1650,' The Burlington Magazine, vol. 32, 1918, pp. 234-240