Near Penshurst, Kent

Patrick Nasmyth was the eldest son of the Scottish portrait and landscape painter Alexander Nasmyth, and he developed into one of Britain's most accomplished landscape painters in the Dutch tradition. Known as the English Hobbema for his masterly rendering of English woodland and pastoral scenery, he specialised in intimate views of the English countryside that combined close observation of trees, water, and sky with careful compositional construction. This 1828 view Near Penshurst in Kent was painted in a county long associated with English pastoral poetry and literary landscape — Philip Sidney's birthplace, immortalised in Ben Jonson's country-house poem. Nasmyth's early blindness in one eye was said to have sharpened his remaining visual acuity, and his detailed, affectionate attention to individual trees and textures gives his landscapes a distinctive intimacy.

Nasmyth builds the foliage through multiple layers of broken colour — warm greens, yellow ochres, and cool grey-greens — applied with a variety of brushmarks that differentiate oak from elm from ash. The sky is broadly painted in thin scumbles, its broken clouds reflecting the Dutch weather tradition he admired.