PIETER DE MOLIJN (LONDON 1595-1661 HAARLEM)

While the present painting previously bore attributions to Jan van Goyen, Pieter de Neyn and Pieter Nolpe – an artist otherwise unknown as a painter – and was deemed by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot at the time of the 1917 sale to be the work of an artist ‘very close to Jan van Goyen’, an early stenciled inscription in French on the reverse of the panel suggests it was executed by Pieter de Molijn in 1620. Molijn had already become a master in Haarlem’s painters guild in 1616, though no dated works by him before 1625 are known.
Reconstruction of Molijn’s earliest activity as a painter is inhibited by the infrequency with which he signed or dated the monochrome landscapes he produced for the open market and his relatively consistent approach to his subjects throughout his career (see M. Boers, ‘Pieter de Molijn (1597-1661): A Dutch Painter and the Art Market in the Seventeenth Century,’ JHNA, 9:2, Summer 2017). However, as Peter Sutton has recently noted, the execution and tonality of this painting are entirely consistent with Molijn’s paintings later in the decade (loc. cit.). Moreover, the dynamic diagonal composition and characteristic pronounced nose of the rower in red likewise feature in Molijn’s earliest dated works.