MOLYN, Pieter de

This picture is the work of two painters. Pieter de Molyn painted the tavern, trees and background, and the young Gerard Terborch composed the three travellers and their horses.

The painting depicts an extensive dune landscape with travellers and horse-drawn wagon on a path, with a village in the background. It is signed and dated lower left.

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. This important phase in the development of Netherlandish landscape painting began circa 1626 and continued throughout the 1630s.

The present painting, a typical early tonal work by Molyn, shows a dune landscape with travellers resting, extensive flatlands beyond.

Pieter Molyn was born of Flemish parents in London. Neither the date of his emigration to Holland nor the name of his teacher are known. There is no documentary evidence for the assertion found in the early literature that he studied with Frans Hals, however, he did provide landscapes for a few of Hals’s portraits. In 1616 he joined the guild at Haarlem, where he spent most of his life. His earliest works show the influence of Mannerists, such as Bloemart and Savery, but much more important for him was the impact of Esaias van de Velde’s art. Van de Velde was active in Haarlem when Molyn joined the guild there. Not much later, Molyn probably met Jan van Goyen, who was sent to Haarlem around 1617 to study with van de Velde.

Molyn’s innovations are first seen in his modest Dunes, which abandons the device of breaking up a landscape into many layers. Scattered details seen from a low point of view have been subordinated to large areas of light and shadow, and the scene has been unified by prominent diagonals which lead the eye over the dunes past the small figures into the distance.

The present late work by Pieter de Molyn depicts a hilly landscape with wanderers at the foot of a castle ruin. The artist often used towering manmade structures, such as towers or windmills, as framing devices in his works.

Peasants returning from the fields have stopped for a moment by an old man sitting by the side of the road. The juxtaposition of young and old, which is a frequent motif in Dutch art, is in this case quite fortuitous. In fact the picture records a brief instant and is so generalized that it lacks all narrative quality. The painter expresses neither scorn, pity nor tenderness for his figures; his attitude is completely objective. Nevertheless the people portrayed are in one respect different from the tillers of the land usually seen in Dutch peasant genre : they are drawn on a larger scale. Here the landscape is less important than the figures and there is more attempt at characterization.

Pictures of peasant cottages flourished in the Netherlands during the early seventeenth century, especially in Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht. The present panel from De Molyn’s early period is a rolling dune landscape west of Haarlem, where trees and bushes stubbornly survive in the sandy soil.

The painting shows an extensive foreign landscape with distant mountains beyond a wide plain seen from a high vantage point, which recalls the Flemish panoramic landscapes of half a century earlier.

The story of Tobias is recounted in the Book of Tobit. Tobias was sent by his father Tobit to Media to recover a sum of money he had hidden there earlier. Archangel Raphael, sent by God to help Tobit and his family, asked Tobit (who did not recognize the angel) whether he may escort his son on his journey and, in company with Tobias’ faithful hound, they departed together. They reached the Tigris, where Tobias was attacked by a gigantic fish. The archangel ordered him to capture it and had him remove and conserve its gall, heart and liver. The innards proved to be a medicine which he can use to restore his father’s sight.