In this idyllic view of the world, the season is summer, the foliage of the trees is dense and lush, sunlight breaks through the billowing clouds in soft pools of light to give warmth to the day, and men and women wander along paths, stopping to converse, or sit idly by a pool of water to fish. Hobbema’s view of A Wooded Landscape, one of his most harmonious compositions, has been highly praised since Smith first published it in 1835, when it was in the collection of Charles Cobbe. Waagen, for example, wrote in 1854: “Seldom has the power of art in expressing the effect of the low afternoon sun in the light clouds in the sky, on tree, bush, and meadow, been exhibited with such astonishing power, transparency and freshness as in this picture.”
Signed and dated 1663, this painting is among the first of Hobbema’s fully mature works. Here he has freed himself from the overt dependence on Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, c. 1628/1629 - 1682) evident in his compositions from the previous years, for example, The Travelers. The landscape is now open and spacious, the painterly touch more delicate and varied, and the palette considerably lighter than in earlier paintings. Hobbema draws the viewer back into the forest with pools of light that accent distant foliage and silhouette tree trunks rising before them, a device he more fully exploits in his later paintings, for example, Hut among Trees. He uses this technique effectively to enhance the recession into space of the small trees growing along the side of the dike in the right middle ground. Stechow has noted that the configuration of these trees, which he terms “tin-soldier trees,” relates back to Hobbema’s earliest compositions (for example, A River Scene, 1658, Detroit Institute of Arts). One might thus argue that Hobbema was here sufficiently free of Ruisdael’s influence to reach back and draw upon motifs that were part of his repertoire before becoming Ruisdael’s student. The location of Hobbema’s scene is not known, although the close similarities to a drawing of this wooded glade attributed to Hobbema, formerly in the Emile Wolf Collection, New York (see the 1995 archived version of this entry), suggest that it is based upon an actual site. Hobbema also painted a second, slightly simplified version of the scene, now in the Wallace Collection [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Meindert Hobbema, A Wooded Landscape, c. 1663, oil on canvas, Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.
When Smith published the painting in 1835, he indicated that it was a companion piece to the masterful landscape of the same dimensions and date now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, and formerly in the collection of Sir Alfred Beit [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Meindert Hobbema, Landscape with Cows and Travellers, 1663, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. Both paintings have a distinctive signature in which Hobbema wrote out in full his complete name. At that time the Washington painting was in the collection of Charles Cobbe in Ireland, and the Beit painting was owned by an English politician, the Rt. Hon. Edward John Littleton (1791–1863), who was made 1st Baron Hatherton in 1835. No earlier provenance, however, exists to confirm that the paintings were ever together. Both paintings can stand by themselves as independent creations and compositional parallels are not particularly strong. In the Dublin painting, moreover, the cows appear to be painted by Adriaen van de Velde (Dutch, 1636 - 1672), whereas no such collaboration with a staffage painter is evident in the Washington work. Smith’s statement must therefore be treated with some skepticism. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that we know so little of the types and character of seventeenth-century landscape pendants that his assertion cannot be totally discounted.
The painting was clearly greatly appreciated by its owners, to judge by a fascinating account of the circumstances of its sale by Charles Cobbe in 1839, published by his daughter Frances Power Cobbe in 1894. She wrote as follows: “Though often hard pressed to carry out with a very moderate income all his projects of improvements, [my father] was never in debt. One by one he rebuilt or re-roofed almost every cottage on his estate, making what had been little better than pig-styes, fit for human habitation; and when he found that his annual rents could never suffice to do all that was required in this way for his tenants in his mountain property, he induced my eldest brother, then just of age, to join with him in selling two of the pictures which were the heirlooms of the family and the pride of the house, a Gaspar Poussin and a Hobbema, which last now adorns the walls of Dorchester House. I remember as a child seeing the tears in his eyes as this beautiful painting was taken out of the room in which it had been like a perpetual ray of sunshine. But the sacrifice was completed, and eighty good stone and slate ‘Hobbema Cottages,’ as we called them, soon rose all over Glenasmoil. Be it noted by those who deny every merit in an Anglo-Irish landlord, that not a farthing was added to the rent of the tenants who profited by this real act of self-denial.” Hobbema would have been pleased to know that the sale of his painting created new housing for so many families.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
