Country House near the Water 1646

Jan van Goyen created this painting, Country House near the Water, using oil on wood. Van Goyen was part of a wave of Dutch artists who turned away from grand religious or historical subjects. Instead, they focused on the everyday. Here, he has depicted a placid moment of exchange. Figures in a small boat meet with a lone figure on the shore. The scene evokes a society increasingly structured around trade. The material qualities of the painting are also striking. It has an overall tonality achieved through the application of thin, translucent layers of paint called glazes. Consider too, the support: wood. As the Dutch landscape was largely flat, good-quality timber was a precious commodity. The fact that this painting is not particularly large suggests an awareness of the relative value of materials, and a scale appropriate to the new domestic spaces of the rising merchant class. Thinking about materials and their context helps us to appreciate the painting's meaning. It also encourages us to see landscape, not as a neutral scene, but as a representation of changing social relations.