Jan Van Goyen, Dunes with Travelers, 1628, recently sold at auction in Prague (for a surprisingly small amount of money).



When I went to L'Abri in Eck-en-Wiel, in the Betuwe of central Holland (the "land between the rivers"), in the autumn of 1973, I traveled all over the country; it's not very big. I'd only heard of a few big names in Dutch painting, and was only beginning to understand my own preoccupation with landscapes. Van Goyen struck me even more profoundly than the other Dutch landscapists like Ruisdael, Hobbema, or even Vermeer and Rembrandt, who struck me profoundly enough. Every one of Van Goyen's skies was different. And every one was, somehow, right. The color of the Dutch sky--which I watched from my the window of my unheated garret's window on the third floor of the big farm house in the orchard by the canal--changes like screen saver. What struck me for the first time in my life was that those skies were big, like Montana's, wet like Massachusetts's, and never simply white and blue and gray.


The infinite palette and textures of the sky are remarkable in Northern Europe. There's not much relief in the landscape to distract. And Van Goyen tracked every one of them. And it was something of a revelation after traveling to the cities of the country--Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Delft, Haarlem--to come to the North Sea in Zandvoort and fine dunes, just like home on Cape Cod. Van Goyen picks up on that, too. Sand like mashed potatoes, as here. But Van Goyen's skies and landscape run the whole gamut of what Holland offers. And they offer a naturalism that anticipates Constables, two centuries before. Still, like the other seventeenth century landscapists in France, and Italy, he finds a way to compose using coulisse devices


Holland was a wonderful experience for me. Art was a central part of it, but so was the rural and urban countryside in the deepening fall. And the skies. I read the complete works of Robert Frost to feed my New English nostalgia.