ORThe Open Room
Digital gallery
Back to the NGA collection
A rutted, dirt road curves from the bottom center of the canvas toward and behind a grove of tall trees to our left, beneath a pale blue sky with fluffy white clouds that fills the top two-thirds of this horizontal landscape painting. The broad, green canopies of the trees to our left create deep shade over twisting trunks, shrubs, and grasses. A narrow stream meandering alongside the road to our left reflects the moss, pine, and sage greens of the leaves. The land rises in a sloping bank to our right, and leads back to open fields with hedgerows that stretch to the horizon. Shorter, more spindly trees cluster along the bank in the distance. Tiny in scale, people are sprinkled throughout the landscape, either singly or in small groups. In the shade of the grove to our left, a man with dark pantaloons, a brown hat and coat, and a walking stick strolls along the road with a woman wearing a red skirt, a dark shirt, and a white apron and cap. Just off the curve of the road to our right, another man with a walking stick, tan hat, and dark gray pantaloons talks to a woman also wearing red, black, and white. Another person, slightly smaller in stature, stands between them. At a pond farther back from this trio, a man with a broad-brimmed hat sits fishing at the edge of the water. Barely visible, a house with a pitched roof, a tall, brick-red chimney, and a white picket fence peeks out from behind the trees beyond the pond. Finally, a man wearing a rust-orange coat, gray pantaloons with white stockings, and a tall hat, carrying a pole propped on his shoulder, walks toward us on a footpath running alongside the fields. Tall, cream-white clouds dot the pale blue sky above, and tiny dots of dark paint suggest flying birds. Soft sunlight pours across the countryside. The artist signed and dated the painting in small script in the lower right corner: “meijndert Hobbema F 1663.”
Read the visual description

A rutted, dirt road curves from the bottom center of the canvas toward and behind a grove of tall trees to our left, beneath a pale blue sky with fluffy white clouds that fills the top two-thirds of this horizontal landscape painting. The broad, green canopies of the trees to our left create deep shade over twisting trunks, shrubs, and grasses. A narrow stream meandering alongside the road to our left reflects the moss, pine, and sage greens of the leaves. The land rises in a sloping bank to our right, and leads back to open fields with hedgerows that stretch to the horizon. Shorter, more spindly trees cluster along the bank in the distance. Tiny in scale, people are sprinkled throughout the landscape, either singly or in small groups. In the shade of the grove to our left, a man with dark pantaloons, a brown hat and coat, and a walking stick strolls along the road with a woman wearing a red skirt, a dark shirt, and a white apron and cap. Just off the curve of the road to our right, another man with a walking stick, tan hat, and dark gray pantaloons talks to a woman also wearing red, black, and white. Another person, slightly smaller in stature, stands between them. At a pond farther back from this trio, a man with a broad-brimmed hat sits fishing at the edge of the water. Barely visible, a house with a pitched roof, a tall, brick-red chimney, and a white picket fence peeks out from behind the trees beyond the pond. Finally, a man wearing a rust-orange coat, gray pantaloons with white stockings, and a tall hat, carrying a pole propped on his shoulder, walks toward us on a footpath running alongside the fields. Tall, cream-white clouds dot the pale blue sky above, and tiny dots of dark paint suggest flying birds. Soft sunlight pours across the countryside. The artist signed and dated the painting in small script in the lower right corner: “meijndert Hobbema F 1663.”

National Gallery of Art · Painting

A Wooded Landscape

Meindert Hobbema

Date
1663
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 94.7 x 130.5 cm (37 5/16 x 51 3/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
1937.1.61
Credit line
Andrew W. Mellon Collection
Time span
1651 to 1700
Department
CNE-B
Original NGA record Wikidata

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • Baroque
  • Dutch
  • Landscape
  • Netherlands
  • landscape
  • Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century (NGA Online Editions)
Provenance

Thomas Cobbe [1733-1814], Newbridge House, Donabate, near Dublin, by 1770;[1] gift 1810, with the Cobbe estates and painting collection, to his grandson, Charles Cobbe [1782-1857]; sold 1839 through Michael Gernon to (Thomas Brown, London); sold 4 April 1840 to Robert Stayner Holford, M.P. [1808-1892], Dorchester House, London, and Westonbirt, Gloucestershire;[2] by inheritance to his son, Lieut.-Col. Sir George Lindsay Holford, K.C.V.O. [1860-1926];[3] purchased 1901 through (Charles J. Wertheimer, London) by J. Pierpont Morgan [1837-1913], New York;[4] by inheritance to his son, J.P. Morgan, Jr. [1867-1943], New York; consigned February 1935 to (M. Knoedler & Co., New York); sold 13 December 1935 to Andrew W. Mellon, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.; deeded 24 June 1937 to The A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh;[5] gift 1937 to NGA. [1] Thomas Cobbe may have acquired the painting by Hobbema upon the recommendation of the Rev. Matthew Pilkington (1701–1774), who was private secretary to Thomas’ father, Charles Cobbe (1686–1765), the Archbishop of Dublin. Pilkington wrote enthusiastically about the Hobbema, then in Cobbe’s collection, in his book _The Gentleman’s and Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Painters_ (London, 1770), 288. The Knoedler prospectus for the painting (in NGA curatorial files) says the painting was owned by the elder Charles Cobbe (Thomas’ father) and then inherited by the younger Charles Cobbe, who is incorrectly identified as the elder Charles’ grandson, when he was in fact the great-grandson. The prospectus does not name Thomas. [2] For the painting’s early provenance see Alastair Laing, ed., _Clerics & Connoisseurs: The Rev. Matthew Pilkington, the Cobbe Family and the Fortunes of an Irish Art Collection through Three Centuries_, Exh. cat., The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London, 2001: 9, 50-51, 71, 87-89, 116, no. 24, 373 n. 11 for Wheelock and Cobbe essay. [3] _The Holford Collection, Dorchester House_, 2 vols., Oxford, 1927, 2: ix, produced by the executors of Sir G.L. Holford's estate, says that the Hobbema that had belonged to "Mr." (i.e. R.S.) Holford was sold to help pay his death duties. Holford also owned another painting that came to the National Gallery of Art by way of the Andrew W. Mellon Collection, Anthony van Dyck's portrait of Marchesa Balbi (1937.1.49). [4] "In the Sale Room," _Connoisseur_ 1 (September-December 1901): 190. The Knoedler prospectus (in NGA curatorial files) says this sale took place in 1905. [5] The painting was Knoedler no. CA 787. See the letter from Nancy C. Little, librarian, M. Knoedler & Co., New York, to Gregory M.G. Rubinstein, 12 September 1987; the Knoedler bill of sale to Mellon; and Mellon collection records, all in NGA curatorial files.

Inscription

lower right: meijndert hobbema / F 1663

NGA object ID 68. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.