View of Nijmegen
Jan van Goyen·1649
Historical Context
View of Nijmegen from 1649 at the Gemäldegalerie Berlin depicts the ancient city on the Waal river with its hilltop fortress, the Valkhof. Van Goyen painted Nijmegen multiple times, its dramatic hilltop setting providing unusual vertical interest in the typically flat Dutch landscape. Van Goyen's panoramic views exploit the extreme horizontality of the Dutch landscape, placing the horizon very low and devoting most of the canvas to sky. This compositional strategy, developed in the 1630s, bec...
Technical Analysis
The city's distinctive silhouette crowning the hill is rendered with topographic precision within Van Goyen's tonal palette, the broad river providing foreground interest and atmospheric distance.
