A Wooded Landscape

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.

Signed and dated 1663, A Wooded Landscape is one of Hobbema’s most harmonious compositions. Sunlight breaks through the billowing clouds, but the dense summer foliage provides cooling shade to the people on the road who have stopped to converse and to the angler lounging by the pond. Hobbema draws the viewer back into the forest with pools of light that accent distant foliage and tree trunks. A chalk and ink drawing by Hobbema of this wooded glade seems to indicate that the painting represents an actual location.

In the 1830s this painting was a prized possession of a benevolent Irish landowner, Charles Cobbe. According to his daughter, Cobbe sold the Hobbema and another painting in 1839 in order to make urgent repairs to tenants’ cottages on the estate. His daughter remembered the tears in her father’s eyes when the paintings were removed from the wall, but, she noted, "the sacrifice was completed, and eighty good stone and slate ‘Hobbema Cottages,’ as we called them, soon rose all over Glenasmoil." Hobbema would have been pleased to know that the sale of his painting created new housing for so many families.