Hobbema’s style developed very rapidly throughout the 1660s. By the middle of the decade he had opened his compositions to give a light-filled and spacious feeling to his scenes. This painting, signed and dated 1665, is an excellent example of this period of his work. The road that passes through the rural village meanders diagonally into the distance, passing half-timbered houses that sit comfortably within the wooded landscape. The trees, which in earlier works form dense barriers in the middle distance (see A Wooded Landscape), rise only to the left of center. Otherwise, Hobbema has kept them low and relegated them to the peripheries of his scene. To judge from the patterns of light and shade, it seems to be midday. Villagers sit and relax beside the road or talk over the front stoop. Two children play with boats at a small pond beside the road, along which a mounted falconer and his attendant pass into the distance. In the center foreground an elegant couple, the man holding a stick, passes near a traveler with his knapsack resting on a cut log.
Hobbema lived and worked in Amsterdam, yet with only a few exceptions, his paintings represent rural scenes, most of which have never been precisely identified. As in many of his paintings, the half-timbered buildings with their tie-beam construction seen in this small village are characteristic of the vernacular architecture in the eastern provinces of the Netherlands, in the border area between the river Twente in the province of Overijssel and the western part of the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Two paintings by Hobbema containing buildings of this type have been identified as representing watermills that belonged to the manor house of Singraven near Denekamp, a Dutch village in Overijssel. It seems probable that he derived many of his scenes (see also A Farm in the Sunlight) from visits to this area in the company of his teacher Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, c. 1628/1629 - 1682), who is known to have visited Overijssel on his trip to Bentheim in the early 1650s. It is not known if Hobbema also made separate trips to this region, but buildings of this type first appear in his work around 1662 (as in The Travelers).
Part of the difficulty in identifying the exact location of such a view is that Hobbema freely varied architectural motifs and the placements of buildings within his works. Although this painting convinces the viewer of its fidelity to nature through the careful observation of light, gentle flow of the landscape, and attention to architectural detail, a smaller variant in the Frick Collection, New York, from the same year, A Village among Trees, differs in many respects [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Meindert Hobbema, Village among Trees, 1665, oil on panel, Frick Collection, New York. Photo © The Frick Collection, New York. While the general disposition of elements in the two paintings is extremely close, the relative scale, placement, and structural elements of the buildings are not identical. Both of these paintings, moreover, essentially elaborate upon a composition now in the Louvre, Paris, that Hobbema painted in 1662.
Another similar composition, A Wooded Landscape with Cottages [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Meindert Hobbema, A Wooded Landscape with Cottages, c. 1665, oil on canvas, Mauritshuis, The Hague, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, has been traditionally considered a companion piece to A View on a High Road. The paintings hung as such in the Fizeau, Agar, and Grosvenor collections until the Washington painting was sold to Alfred Charles de Rothschild at the end of the nineteenth century. It is highly unlikely, however, that they were actually designed as pendants, for the compositions are parallel rather than complementary; the dimensions are also slightly different.
The presence of the elegantly dressed couple strolling on the road through the village is an unusual feature of the Washington painting. Hobbema did not usually include such figures in his paintings. Whether they represent country gentry or city visitors, vast differences exist between their social status and that of the peasants seated by the edge of the road. Curiously, given their importance within the composition, these figures are rather poorly painted; they float above the surface of the road and lack physical substance. They were apparently executed by a different staffage painter than the one who depicted the peasants, who have a greater sense of solidity. Although the names Adriaen van de Velde (Dutch, 1636 - 1672) and Johannes Lingelbach (1622–1674) have been suggested, the style of the peasants and the elegant couple does not resemble that of either artist. The figures were present in 1786 when the painting was engraved, in reverse, by James Mason.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
