Meindert Hobbema Amsterdam 1638 - 1709

Count de Pourtales, London;
His sale, London, Phillips, May 19, 1826, lot 119, for 420 guineas;
Lord Wharncliffe, by 1835;
By whom sold to John Smith in 1840;
By whom sold to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Paris, by 1842;
Henry Thomas Hope, by 1855;
Emile and Isaac Pereire, Paris;
Their sale, Paris, Pillet, March 6, 1872, lot 125, for 81,000 francs;
Baron de Beurnonville, Paris;
His sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, May 9, 1881, lot 321;
Adolf Wilhelm von Carstanjen (died 1900);
Adolf Wilhelm von Carstanjen Familienstiftung;
From which acquired by the Government of Russia in December 1933 in part exchange for a pair of portraits of Barbara und Hans Schellenberger by Hans Burgkmair the Elder, de-accessioned earlier in 1933 from the Hermitage, St Petersburg;
Wirth Arnold Seligmann & Rey, New York (by 1937);
With French and Co., Inc., New York;
Linda and Gerald Guterman, Bedford, New York;
Their sale, New York, Sotheby's, January 14, 1988, lot 20, when acquired by the present owner.

Jacob van Ruisdael claimed in 1660 that Hobbema had been his pupil for "some years", but it is only in the early 1660s that Hobbema's landscapes, which had hitherto conformed to the standard Haarlem formulae, start to reflect the influence of the older artist.  At this date, around 1662, Hobbema's landscapes start to develop rapidly, taking Ruisdael's model as a starting-point, and his towering achievement as a landscape painter as a source of inspiration and as a goal.  His style developed with startling rapidity, so that by 1664 he was painting some of his greatest works.  We are thus faced with the paradox that while Hobbema's landscapes are unimaginable without those of Jacob van Ruisdael, the latter's active influence on his work is remarkably short-lived, although Hobbema never subsequently strayed far from the subtly restrained palette and pervasive tactile qualities of his teacher.

While a series of dated works allow us to gauge the steep trajectory of Hobbema's swift development in the first half of the 1660s, very few dated paintings are known from after this period, so the subsequent course of his career is largely left to guesswork.  While in many, perhaps most of his mature works Hobbema depicts the predominately wooded landscape and characteristic timber-framed vernacular architecture of Gelderland and other parts of the Eastern Netherlands, following the lead of Ruisdael who travelled there in the early 1650s, Hobbema's pictures display a gentler aspect of the Dutch countryside than those of Ruisdael, and a different mood, generally avoiding Ruisdael's brooding melancholy.  More typical of him is the fluid light that conveys the calm and quiet of a sunny afternoon in the Dutch countryside. 

This composition is particularly striking, in part because the structure of the landscape is built around two distinct vanishing points. The subject matter, a wooded landscape with genre elements in the form of a rider and his dogs on the right, and two peasants and a horse-drawn cart on the left, may be qualified as archetypal of Hobbema's work. When commenting on this picture, Smith states it is "painted with a full pencil of colour, and possesses extraordinary freshness and breadth of effect" (see Literature below). Indeed, the combination of a controlled palette, with a few touches of bold, saturated red, used for the characters' garments produces an eye-catching effect and engages the viewer.

As with many great pictures that he handled, John Smith sung the praises of this one, writing that it "is painted with a full pencil of colour, and possesses extraordinary freshness, and breadth of effect'" . Unusually, it did not stay in England after being imported for the Pourtales sale, but returned to France, then came back to England, when it entered the legendary Hope collection, and then returned once more to France before entering the highly distinguished collection of the Cologne financier Adolf von Carstanjen. .Many of his pictures remained in Cologne, and in 1935 the rump of the collection was sold for 2.2 million Reichsmarks to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, where they remain today as the backbone of the Dutch picture collection.