Pieter de Molijn

Essay:

Pieter de Molijn (or Molyn) was born in London to Flemish parents. Molijn was elected a member of the Guild in Haarlem in 1616 and in 1624 was elected to the Honourable Company of Arquebusiers. It is possible that he was a student of Esaias van de Velde. It is now known that Molijn travelled to Rome where he executed a drawing with an inscription in the album amicorum of the painter Wybrand de Geest which he signed and dated 'Rome 6th June 1618'. Molijn served administrative roles in the Haarlem Guild in the 1630s and 40s and appears to have remained in Haarlem until his death in 1661

Along with Salomon van Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen, Molijn was one of the most important figures among Haarlem landscape painters of the early 1600s helping to usher in the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. Limiting his range of motifs and colour, he also combined an unprecedented sense of realism with powerful diagonal compositions and strong effects of light and dark.

Molijn's early work was influenced by the realism of Esaias van de Velde, and it is very likely that he learnt much from his pupil van Goyen, both artists gleaning inspiration from each other. His large oeuvre of paintings and drawings (albeit not as prolific as that of van Goyen) shows he was a hard working-artist. As a draughtsman in later life his drawings were intended more as individual works of art than preliminary studies.

Pieter de Molijn had a busy studio and amongst some of his better-known pupils were Allart van Everdingen, Gerard ter Borch, and Christian de Hulst.

-

Stylistically this work appears to hail from Molijn's earliest artistic phase, from 1625 - 1631, the period which Wolfgang Stechow considered to be his most original. These works are typified by a new naturalism in Dutch art with the tonal, almost monochrome style developing in Haarlem, loose brushwork, and simple sweeping landscapes with a diagonal emphasis like a road (or in the present picture a frozen canal) to lead the eye deeper into the painting. The landscapes evoke the terrain surrounding his native Haarlem with a few travellers, trees, and buildings. For Molijn's most famous painting from this early period see 'Landscape with Dunes and a Sandy Road', oil on panel, 26 x 36 cm, Braunschweig, Herzog Ulrich-Museum, inv. 338.

Provenance:

Private Collection, UK