Wooded Landscape with Figures and Cottage

This undated canvas at St Anne's College, Oxford, exemplifies Hobbema's characteristic combination of wooded setting and human figures in a format that was commercially successful throughout his career. The college's acquisition of this work reflects the pattern of Dutch and Flemish old master collecting by Oxford and Cambridge colleges that began in the eighteenth century when such paintings were accessible and fashionable, and continued into the twentieth through gifts and bequests. Hobbema's wooded landscape with figures became one of the canonical types of Dutch landscape painting, influencing subsequent British landscape painters — particularly Gainsborough — who admired his combination of atmospheric observation and compositional organisation.

Hobbema builds the wooded space through overlapping planes of trees at different depths, the space between their trunks providing glimpses of lighter areas beyond. Figures and cottage are placed in the middle distance, their scale confirming the spatial organisation established by the trees.