River landscape with travellers at an inn at sunset

In 1650-51 Jan van Goyen undertook a trip along the villages of the Rhine and Waal river, travelling via Tiel, Nijmegen and Emmerich to Cleves and returning via Renkum and Bodegraven to Arnhem. During his journey the artist recorded the changing landscape in a small sketchbook, which must have contained around 200 drawings. The album was dissembled at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Amsterdam art dealer Anton Mensing (1866-1936). These sketches were used by Jan van Goyen for both his finished drawings and for his paintings. The prominent motif of the inn in the present painting may have been taken from one or more of these sketches, although no such sketch survives today. It is reminiscent of a building in a drawing with a cluster of houses, numbered by a later hand ‘143’ (see H.U. Beck, op. cit., I, p. 304, no. 847⁄143; recently exhibited by M. Mosler, Jan van Goyen’s sketchbook 1650-1651, New York, 2021, no. 14). The same building also features in a picture by van Goyen on panel (45.5 x 63 cm.), last recorded in 1972 with Leger in London (see H.U. Beck, op. cit., II, p. 278, no. 612, ill.). Here, the inn is placed prominently on a river bank, also to the right of the composition, with the well moved further into the distance. Beck dates the Leger picture to circa 1650.
Executed in 1651, this painting is fully characteristic of van Goyen’s style of the early 1650s. By this time van Goyen favoured a transparent preparation for his panels, using ground glass or colourless smalt, which allowed the colour and the grain of the panel to show through and thus be incorporated into the gradations of his palette. The palette of this painting employs more earthen tones than the yellow-brown monochrome palette van Goyen favoured in the 1540s. The move away from his tonal pictures in the 1650s is anticipated in the blue of the sky and reflects the artist's increasing interest in light and atmosphere later in his career. The brushwork is rapid yet nuanced and the paint is thickly applied in places to describe for instance the sunlit brickwork of the inn. The diagonal structure, the artist so favoured throughout his career, is still strongly present and the narrative detail attests to his gifts not only as a painter of nature and light, but also as a storyteller.