Fort Lillo on the Scheldt

Fort Lillo on the Scheldt from 1643 at the Currier Museum depicts the fortification that guarded the river approach to Antwerp during the decades when the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands maintained their tense division of the southern Low Countries. The Scheldt fortifications were of genuine strategic importance — control of the river mouth was central to the economic contest between Dutch Amsterdam and Spanish-controlled Antwerp. Van Goyen developed his distinctive tonal monochrome palette in the 1630s, restricting himself to earthy browns, warm greys, and soft greens that gave his landscapes a unified atmospheric quality. His enormous output — over a thousand dated works — reflects the commercial demand for his atmospheric river and estuary views in which topographic documentation and aesthetic pleasure were productively combined. The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, holds this work as part of an American collection that has preserved important examples of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painting far from the European contexts in which they were created.

The fort's profile breaks the horizontal line of the river landscape, Van Goyen's tonal palette rendering the misty Scheldt atmosphere with characteristic atmospheric sensitivity.