Jan van Goyen is one of a handful of artists, along with Esaias van den Velde, Salomon van Ruysdael, and Jacob van Ruisdael, who determined the course of Dutch landscape painting. With these artists Van Goyen accomplished the transition from the decorative, schematic landscape idiom of the sixteenth-century to the fully baroque vocabulary of the seventeenth century. Relying on an almost monochromatic palette, combined with a wet-in-wet technique, Van Goyen’s landscape paintings of the 1630s and 1640s achieved a novel sense of pictorial space and atmosphere.

The San Francisco painting exhibits a device typically seen in Dutch landscapes of the period: the horizon-line positioned very low on the canvas relinquishes almost three-quarters of the pictorial surface to the depiction of the sky. Also characteristic of baroque landscape construction is the organization of the pictorial space from darkened foreground toward the distant light at the horizon. An alternating pattern of strategically placed lights and darks predominates, suggestive of muted sunlight occasionally breaking through a quickly moving weather system. Subtle gradations of tone within the tightly controlled palette of grays heightens the effect of depth and presents a perfect foil for the lightning streaks across the sky in one broken brushstroke. Unusual because of its monumental size, the San Francisco Thunderstorm is also exceptional in Van Goyen’s output owing to the vehemence with which natural forces batter both man and the landscape.

-Lynn Federle Orr, Masterworks of European Painting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1999)