Wooded Landscape with Figures

Meindert Hobbema

National Gallery of Art

Two men and a dog walk or stand on a rutted dirt road that stretches into the distance in front of us, between a grove of trees to our left and a shallow, narrow canal or ditch to our right in this horizontal landscape painting. The horizon comes about a quarter of the way up the composition, and puffy white clouds float across a pale blue sky above. Outlined against the sky, the leaves of some of the trees to our left are olive or moss green, and others are golden yellow. Tiny in scale and a distance from us, the men wear dark, brimmed hats and dark pants and shoes or boots. One wears a crimson-red shirt or jacket and the other has something white, presumably a sack, flung across one shoulder over a dark jacket. The men walk or pause near a short row of three trees between the path and the canal to our right. Farther back and almost lost in shadow to our left, a third person is painted as a dark silhouette walking near the grove of trees. The water in the canal shimmers between marine blue and pale rust brown. The area beyond the canal is flat fields. Painted as a faint gray silhouette along the far distant horizon, the spires of a church and other buildings indicate a town in the deep distance to our right. A few dots of dark paint suggest birds flying high over the fields to our right. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner, making the first two letters into an intertwined monogram: “MHobbema.”