Van Gogh’s admiration for Jan van Goyen’s Landscape with two oaks (1641)

Summary By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Jan van Goyen (1596–1656) was known only within a small circle of artists and art lovers who admired the convincing depiction of nature by seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was one of them. This article analyses the background to Van Gogh’s admiration of Van Goyen’s painting Landscape with two oaks (1641) based on his letters, the drawings and paintings he mentioned, and other nineteenth-century views of seventeenth-century painting. Van Gogh saw the work in early October 1885 at the recently opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The motif of the battered old tree in threatening weather conditions seems to have appealed to him so strongly because of the ‘sentiment’ he detected in it – a term understood as the emotions experienced by people who find themselves in dramatic situations. A second reason for his appreciation lay in Van Goyen’s quick, loose painting technique, which Van Gogh viewed as an appropriate means of expressing an individual experience of reality, while simultaneously evoking a more universal sense of recognition. The distinctive tonal use of colour as well as the colour contrasts in Landscape with two oaks gave him the opportunity to apply the knowledge of colour theory he had acquired from the books of Charles Blanc. In this way, Van Goyen’s painting offered confirmation of the topics that preoccupied Van Gogh around 1885. The transition from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism around 1800 also changed the notion of what it meant to be an artist. The view of art shifted towards aesthetic autonomy, in which it was the artist alone who set the conditions for the artwork. Art was increasingly seen as an alternative system of knowledge to the prevailing rationalism. By extension, with their ability to bestow meaning on reality through their sensitive perception and creativity, artists assumed crucial importance within a self-created world. Having been firmly shaped by these ideas about art and artistic practice, Van Gogh’s vision of art, including his ideas on Van Goyen, grew entirely detached from that of the seventeenth century, even though neither he nor his contemporaries perceived it that way.