Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1596-1656 Jan van Goyen was born in Leiden on Jan. 13, 1596. Apprenticed from the age of 10, he had several masters. About 1617 he went to Haarlem to study with Esaias van de Velde, an important innovator in the Haarlem movement of realistic landscape painting. Van Goyen's works between 1621 and 1625 are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of his teacher. They are colorful, detailed views of villages and roads, usually busy with people, as in Winter (1621). It was Van Goyen's usual practice to sign or monogram and date his paintings. He traveled extensively through the Netherlands and beyond, recording his impressions in sketchbooks, occasionally with dates and often depicting recognizable scenes. Thus the chronology of his development is clear. His paintings of the late 1620s show a steady advance from the strong colors and scattered organization of his early works toward tonality and greater simplicity and unity of composition. By 1630 he was painting monochromes in golden brown or pale green; he played a leading part in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. In 1631 Van Goyen settled in The Hague, where he became a citizen in 1634. The simplicity, airiness, and unification of his compositions continued to increase in his abundant production of dune landscapes, river views, seascapes, town views, and winter landscapes. The River View (1636) displays a river so open and extensive as to suggest the sea, with reflections that prolong the vast and luminous sky. In its monumentalization of humble structures and its composition built on a firm scaffolding of horizontal and vertical forces, it forecast at this early date developments that dominated landscape painting in the 1650s and later. In the Village and Dunes (1647) the traditional double-diagonal composition still exists, but it is dominated by horizontal and vertical accents. Stronger contrasts of light and dark replace the earlier tonality. In the last year of his life Van Goyen produced an eloquent new style, in which powerful forms stand out against the radiant sky and water in an exquisitely balanced composition (Evening Calm; 1656). The commission in 1651 to paint a panoramic view of The Hague for the Burgomaster's Room shows the high regard in which Van Goyen was held. He was enormously productive; well over 1,000 of his paintings still exist, and almost as many drawings. Yet he died insolvent, perhaps because of losses in his various business ventures, and soon after his death on April 27, 1656,   Related Paintings of GOYEN, Jan van :. | View of The Hague in Winter dg | View of Leiden dg | River Landscape with a Windmill and a Ruined Castle sdg | Winter on the River dg | Horse Cart on a Bridge sg |
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adriaen van ostade
Adriaen van Ostade (baptized as Adriaen Hendricx December 10, 1610 ?C buried May 2, 1685) was a Dutch genre painter. He was the eldest son of Jan Hendricx Ostade, a weaver from the town of Ostade near Eindhoven. Although Adriaen and his brother Isaack were born in Haarlem, they adopted the name "van Ostade" as painters. "Peasants in a Tavern" (c. 1635), at the Alte Pinakothek, MunichAccording to Jacobus Houbraken, he was taught from 1627 by Frans Hals, at that time the master of Adriaen Brouwer and Jan Miense Molenaer. At twenty-six he joined a company of the civic guard at Haarlem, and at twenty-eight he married. His wife died in 1640, and he speedily re-married. He again became a widower in 1666. In 1662 he took the highest honors of his profession with the presidency of the painters Guild of Saint Luke in Haarlem. Among the treasures of the Louvre is a striking picture of a father sitting in state, his wife at his side, surrounded by his son, five daughters, and a young married couple in a handsomely furnished room. By an old tradition, Ostade here painted himself and his children in holiday attire; but the style is much too refined for the painter of boors, and Ostade had but one daughter.
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MONNOYER, Jean-Baptiste
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