Jan Griffier the Elder

This signed, highly finished and luminous Rhenish landscape by Jan Griffier the Elder exemplifies the specialty of this prolific and versatile artist. Here, Griffier records a from a birds-eye perspective a mountainous river valley dotted with castles and buildings and animated by countless figures, from merrymakers outside of an inn, to those manning the barges in the lower foreground, to a small caravan of animals and people walking along the river’s shoreline at the river’s bend. Through his brilliant employment of atmospheric perspective, Griffier draws the viewer’s into every corner of this beautiful landscape, which gently recedes into the far distance.

Jan Griffier the Elder was an Anglo-Dutch artist who was born in Amsterdam between 1645 and 1652. He trained as a young artist first with Roelant Roghman in his hometown, and later with Jan Looten in London, where he moved in about 1667. Apart from his travels throughout the Netherlands from about 1696–1704, Griffier primarily lived in England for the majority of his career and established himself as one of the leading landscapists of his day until his death in 1718. Interestingly,  despite being very well-traveled and having traversed the Thames and the Dutch waterways on his own houseboat, Griffier never visited the Rhineland, the subject of many of his works. Indeed, he most likely drew inspiration for these works from Herman Saftleven (1609–1685), a landscape artist from Rotterdam.