A wooded landscape with cottages

This 1665 Wooded Landscape with Cottages at the Fitzwilliam Museum was painted during the peak of Hobbema's career, when his woodland scenes achieved their greatest refinement. The Fitzwilliam, Cambridge University's great art museum, assembled its Dutch Golden Age collection through gifts and purchases over centuries, and this Hobbema joins major examples of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Jan Steen in making the Fitzwilliam one of the finest repositories of Dutch seventeenth-century painting in Britain. His 1665 cottages in woodland exemplify the subject at its most characteristically achieved: modest dwellings, tall trees, a diffused warm light that gives the scene its characteristic pleasurable quality.

The cottages are integrated into the woodland setting with Hobbema's characteristic sensitivity to the relationship between architecture and natural forms, the dappled light unifying buildings and trees in a single atmospheric envelope.