Het Valkhof in Nijmegen volgens Jan van Goyen

In the Middle Ages, Gelre was a county within the Holy Roman Empire. From 1330 on, Gelre became a duchy. The oldest city in Gelre, since Roman times, is Nijmegen. In 1230 the city was elevated to an imperial city. As a result, Nijmegen came under the direct authority of the emperor and Nijmegen was politically an enclave in the county. But soon the emperor had to pledge the city again to the Gelrese count out of financial difficulties. Nijmegen became the capital of one of the four quarters in the later duchy. One of the grand masters of landscape painting in the seventeenth century was Jan van Goyen (Leiden, 1596 - The Hague, 1659). Between 1638 and 1654 he painted the Valkhofburcht near Nijmegen thirty times. Van Goyen probably based these works on a drawing he made during a trip through Gelderland in the 1930s. Thanks to these representations of the castle, we can still form an image of the imposing building on the Waal. This work can be seen until September 23, 2018 in Gelderland Grensland, an exhibition in CODA Museum Apeldoorn that brings together landscape painting from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. An excellent opportunity to travel through the province of Gelderland on the basis of masterpieces from four centuries of art history! www.coda-apeldoorn.nl/gg Image: Jan van Goyen, Het Valkhof in Nijmegen, 1641, oil on canvas, loan from the Rijksmuseum