Meindert Hobbema, 'A Woody Landscape with a Cottage', about 1665

A rutted cart track leads straight into the middle of the picture. A group of figures are caught in a patch of sunlight while a cottage merges into the shadows. A frieze of trees stands out against a sunny glade and a cloudy sky beyond.

Many of Hobbema’s landscapes were composed around these specific elements. The vast majority were almost certainly not real views, but studio paintings designed to evoke the woodlands around Haarlem near his home town of Amsterdam. This painting is an archetypal example of his work. In fact, it seems to have been one of his favourite arrangements: three other versions of the same scene, with slight differences, have survived (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Mauritshuis, The Hague; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.).

This type of specialisation was typical of the time: most artists in seventeenth-century Holland worked in a particular genre. Hobbema had learnt to paint landscapes as an apprentice to Jacob van Ruisdael, who was the leading landscape artist of the time. But while his teacher’s work often captured the energy and drama of the natural world, Hobbema preferred an atmosphere of quiet reflection. There are subtle hints of death and decay – in the fallen trunk and leafless branches we see on the left – but the painting generally avoids troubling the viewer with worldly cares.

In fact, here Hobbema even seems to play down the economic role played by woodland at the time – it was a valuable resource and a source of work and income for the people who lived there. What we see here is known as wood pasture, a landscape which supported livestock grazing as well as the harvesting of timber, which was the most flexible and important construction material of the time. Timber was also vital for firewood, fencing, charcoal and other uses – for example, the birch trees we see in this painting were used for medicines, cosmetics and perfumes, while alder made scaffold poles and the soles of clogs.

But working life is hardly hinted at in this picture. There is some fencing, but no sign of domestic animals except a man with a dog. Other figures stand chatting or watching idly from the doorway. Instead, this is a picturesque, positive – even idealised – evocation of country life. And Hobbema subtly underlined that gentle, harmonious view of the world in the composition itself. The painting is full of curves and meanders; even the strong diagonals of the cottage roofline are softened by the surrounding foliage. There is balance too – the canopy of the tallest tree is reflected by the shape of the cloud next to it, and the three figures in the foreground form a neat symmetrical group, right on the centre line of the painting.