Landscape with Three Trees

Ca 1760–1765. Oil on canvas

Johannes Janson studied military engineering in Indonesia, but returned to the Netherlands after giving up his military career, and focussed on painting. He became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Leiden in 1761. His idyllic dune landscapes, modelled after the works of the Dutch Golden Age painters Paulus Potter and Jan Wijnants, were warmly received by the rich upper-class citizens of Leiden.

The painting “Landscape with Three Trees” has a lot in common with the works of the Haarlem painter Jan Wijnants: the motif, structure and choice of colour resemble Wijnants’s dune landscapes from the 1660s–1670s. Wijnants was one of the most highly appreciated landscape painters in the Netherlands in the second half of the 17th century. His colourful and meticulously crafted dune landscapes, bordered with exuberant trees, also became extremely popular among collectors and artists in Britain and France in the 18th–19th centuries; it is likely that the signature of the original author was erased from the painting and replaced with the more valuable “Wijnants” during that period.