A Woody Landscape

This 1665 Woody Landscape at the National Gallery is among Hobbema's most purely arboreal compositions, focusing on the trees themselves rather than on mills or buildings. Such compositions demonstrated that the tree alone — its specific species character, its individual growth pattern, its response to light — could carry a landscape painting's entire visual interest. The National Gallery's exceptional Dutch collection allows this purely arboreal Hobbema to be seen alongside the full range of his and his contemporaries' achievement in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

The trees dominate the composition with their varied forms and textures, Hobbema demonstrating his unrivaled ability to differentiate species and render the play of light through diverse foliage types.