A Wooded Landscape with Figures

This 1658 Wooded Landscape with Figures at the National Gallery of Art represents Hobbema's early work under the direct influence of his teacher Jacob van Ruisdael. The composition shows his absorption of Ruisdael's approach to woodland landscape — the dense canopy overhead, the winding path through the trees, the figures reduced to staffage that establishes scale — while beginning to develop his own more cheerful approach to the subject. The National Gallery of Art's Dutch Golden Age holdings include this early Hobbema among the great examples of seventeenth-century landscape painting assembled through American philanthropic collecting in the early twentieth century.

The early work shows Hobbema developing his characteristic approach to woodland subjects, with careful rendering of individual trees and the play of light through foliage that would become his signature.