 Hi everybody, welcome to Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Robin Creeran, Collections Research Coordinator at the Barnes Foundation. We're looking at the North Wall of Room 14 right now and we're going to take a closer look at this painting right here. It is titled The Square Watchtower, gets its name from this building right here, and it was painted by the Dutch artist Jan van Huyen in 1651. He was born on January 13th 1596 and he began his training in his native city of Lijden at the very young age of 10. He studied under six different masters and he traveled regularly throughout the Netherlands until finally settling in The Hague in 1632. That's where he remained for the rest of his life, but he did take sketching trips outside of the city. He was an extremely prolific painter creating around 1200 paintings and a thousand drawings in his lifetime. In the 1630s he helped to develop a new approach to the representation of landscape painting that focused on local subjects like fishing grounds canals and rivers, kind of what we see in this painting. And he used a tonal palette of primarily browns, grays and greens and some yellows, very monochromatic. This came to be recognized as the golden age of Dutch landscape painting and he was highly respected because of it. He was highly respected within his artistic community of The Hague and was the headman of the Painters Guild in both 1638 and 1640. So let's take a closer look at this painting in particular. The clearing blue and pink and bits of white sky really dominate the composition of this painting and provide a bright and contrasting background for the much more monochromatic tones of brown and gray that we see in below the horizon, like in the watchtower here and throughout the landscape, even in these boats that are arriving into the shore. The low horizon which was common for the artist's work gives the painting a sense of expansiveness and depth. Because of the flatness of the land we can see very far off into the distance and it only is emphasized by that low horizon. The light source appears to come from the left hand side, perhaps the upper left, so it's maybe dawn or dusk. So that might indicate why we see this ferry arriving at the shore. Perhaps it's a ferry of soldiers who are relieving those who stand next to the cannon here. Could also be some fishermen or some other people who are arriving at the shore for a day of work or at the end of the day's work. So when we look at the watchtower we do a little more closely. We see detail in the painting but it is somewhat obscured by this use of the same tones. Even the people themselves are somewhat lost. If they weren't outlined they really wouldn't be, they would really be hard to distinguish between the background in which they sit. In the background here we see this church steeple indicating that perhaps this is a village. We see some people walking over to it so maybe that is a village. But these masses of some color, this brown and a little bit of green, they almost look like they could be vegetation. But also perhaps it's some trees around a village. It's hard to tell because of the fact that these monochromatic tones really just obscure those details. And even when we zoom out a little bit and we take a closer look to hear to this portion of the landscape in the background here, we see this zigzagging river line and buildings along it and clearly there are people here engaging with the water ways there are perhaps fishermen coming in from the water. But again a lot of the detail is somewhat lost because of the use of color. So the exact location of this scene is unknown to us. The artist was known to have altered his landscapes to fit his compositions. So they might be a mixture of different real landscapes made into one imagined one. So this scene may be entirely invented or it may be a representative of a type of place in the Netherlands or a few different places. The artist was interested in creating an overall impression of the place but not necessarily a specific place. And in some other paintings in particular he would depict a very well-known architectural monument but he would completely alter the landscape around it so that it was almost harder to figure out where it was. It was not in its original location in the way that he paints it. So that kind of gives you an idea of what the artist did in his work to alter landscapes to fit his needs and what he wanted to achieve in the landscape itself. So the painting really provides us with a good example of the artist's later style and how it changed to incorporate more luminosity, more brightness and color but also retaining that monochromatic tone of his earlier works. So there are portions of the landscape which we do see a bit more detail where we can differentiate a little bit more detail and perhaps that is because of this kind of luminosity, this brightness. So some of the figures even because of that also seem to somewhat still disappear within the background and a lot of that detail still disappears. So we get a sense of brightness in a bit more detail but then in the background we still lose some of that detail but I think some of that monochromatic tone creates an interesting visual landscape where we can understand that we might not see it every piece of detail of the background or perhaps even the foreground that the time of day and the brightness of the light at that time of day might not have been as strong and so we're seeing something that feels a bit more real and realistic and the background which kind of disappears and even this background here with these these really just these outlines of shapes that that feels kind of like a hazy background something that you a part of the of the landscape which would kind of disappear in the haziness of an early morning or an early evening on this water. So I hope you enjoyed taking a bit more of a closer look at this painting by Jan van Huyen. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below. Thank you for watching.