Landscape with Stream

Van Goyen's Landscape with Stream from 1628 is a very early work, painted when he was only thirty-two and still developing the tonal approach that would make him one of the most influential Dutch landscape painters. In 1628, van Goyen had recently completed his training with Esaias van de Velde in Haarlem — a painter who had already moved toward the naturalistic Dutch landscape style — and was establishing his own practice in Leiden. The landscape here still shows relatively bright local colors and conventional compositional devices, documenting the early stages of van Goyen's development toward the radical tonalism of his 1640s maturity.

This early work retains more color and detail than van Goyen's mature tonal landscapes. The stream and surrounding vegetation are rendered with careful observation, while the sky is beginning to show the atmospheric breadth that would characterize his later paintings. The brushwork is fluid but more precise than his later, more abbreviated manner.