Pieter de Molyn London bapt 1595 - 1661 Haarlem

With Gebr. Douwes, Amsterdam, before 1985;
Mrs. B. Fock-Ter Meulen, The Hague, by whose Estate sold, Amsterdam, Christie's, 6 May 1993, lot 67, when bought by the Herwegs.

H.-U.Beck, Künstler um Jan van Goyen, Augsburg 1991, p. 290, no. 802, reproduced.

With Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael and Pieter Dirckz. van Santvoort, Pieter Molyn was one of the key figures in the so-called 'tonal phase' of Haarlem landscape painting.  These landscapes were characterized by the simplicity of their subject matter, with the emphasis on realism, and were executed with a broad handling of the paint, the palette restricted to dull yellows, browns and greens.  The dune landscape was a favourite, with the soft undulations and large patches of a single colour ideal for a 'tonal' painting.  This important phase in the development of Netherlandish landscape painting began circa 1626 and continued throughout the 1630s; for another example of this style of painting see lot 132.

This picture is a typical early tonal work by Molyn, who has retained in the clump of trees at the left of the composition an echo of the repoussoir device of the earlier Mannerist landscape tradition.  In its low and very distant horizon and the resulting enormous sky, however, it also looks forward to the panoramic landscapes of Philips Koninck in the 1650s.