A Farm in the Sunlight

Meindert Hobbema studied under the noted landscape artist Jacob van Ruisdael, and quite a few of his compositions evolved from the work of his erstwhile master. Hobbema approached nature in a straightforward manner, depicting picturesque, rural scenery enlivened by the presence of peasants or hunters. He often reused favorite motifs such as old watermills, thatch-roofed cottages, and embanked dikes, rearranging them into new compositions. Hobbema’s rolling clouds allow patches of sunshine to illuminate the rutted roads or small streams that lead back into rustic woods. All six of the National Gallery’s canvases by Hobbema share these characteristics.

The Farm in the Sunlight has long been esteemed as one of Hobbema’s finest paintings. It seems to have been one of a pair, its companion piece being The Mill, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, but the paintings were separated at a sale in 1833. In addition to compositional and stylistic similarities, both paintings have a vertical format—rare in Hobbema’s work—strengthening the argument that they were pendants. The watermill in the Louvre painting has been identified as the mill of a country estate in the province of Overijssel, and the half-timbered farmhouse with the high-peaked roof in the Farm in the Sunlight is representative of the architecture of the eastern provinces. This refined painting covers a preliminary sketch that Hobbema executed rapidly in rough paint strokes; he then painted the sky first, leaving reserves for the trees and the landscape.