Summary

Oil painting on panel, Cottages in a Wood (Cottages beside a Track through a Wood) by Meindert Hobbema (Amsterdam 1638 – Amsterdam 1709), signed, bottom mid-right: M. hobbema, circa 1662/4. A rough road in the centre leads between trees to a cottage in the middle distance, on which the sun is shinig and in fron tof which stands a peasant; a man and woman are walking along the track; in the left foreground ii a clump of trees is a cottage with a figure at a half doorway.

Full description

In the first part of this century, before the Impressionists had swept the board, Hobbema's Avenue at Middelharnis (1689), in the National Gallery was probably the most celebrated landscape by a Continental artist in Britain; reproductions of it were to be found in half the homes and schoolrooms of the land. Popular opinion, whilst chiming with Hofstede de Groot's judgement that it was: "the finest picture, next to Rembrandt's Syndics, which has been painted in Holland", was in striking contrast to Sir Walter Scott's opinion that the picture was: "fitter for an artist's studio than a nobleman's collection" . Yet Scott's evaluation was just, to the extent that it is a late and far from typical (in that topographical) work by a painter who, when he wrote, was probably second only to Cuyp in the keenness with which his more characteristic works were sought after or cherished by British collectors . The present picture is a superb example of one of the two types of painting by Hobbema that such connoisseurs cherished most of all, those showing 'Cottages in a Wood' or 'A Water Mill in a wooded landscape'. Most such dated or datable pictures were painted between 1662, when Hobbema began to manifest a personal style evolved from his long apprenticeship to Jacob van Ruisdael (c.1628/29-1682), and 1668, after which time his output was much diminished by his having become a wine-gauger at the Amsterdam tollhouse (a fact that may have swayed Sir Walter Scott's judgement, as much as it impelled Hofstede de Groot into the impossible position of denying the date on the Avenue of Middelharnis, on the grounds that it would have been "impossible for an artist who had given up painting [sic] at thirty for the gauging of barrels of wine to produce such a masterpiece"!). The most clearly comparable landscapes in terms of motif and handling to the Ascott picture (which is unusual for a Hobbema of its size in being on panel, suggesting an especial urge towards refinement, for a particular collector) are perhaps the four variants of another Cottages in a Wood: the canvas in the Widener Collection in the National Gallery of Art in Washington ; the ex-Heywood-Lonsdale little panel now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague ; the large canvas in the National Gallery in London ; and the larger canvas still, in the Robarts collection . None of these is dated (though Christopher Brown would date the National Gallery's picture to around 1665, with the other pictures - in the sequence just given - on either side of it). For dated pictures one must turn for further comparison to the canvases of 1662 from the Arthur de Rothschild Collection now in the Louvre, and in the Elkins Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the ex-Westminster canvas of 1665 in the Mellon Collection in the National Gallery of Art in Washington , and the panel also of 1665 formerly in the Blathwayt collection at Dyrham Park [NT] and now in the Frick Collection in New York ; the canvas of 1667 in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge ; and the panel of 1668 in the Royal Collections . From all these, it will be seen that such pictures were produced within a remarkably short sequence of years. It is the perfection attained by Hobbema in this particular genre of depiction, and the necessarily restricted number of them that he was able to produce in these years of full activity as a mature artist, between 1662 and 1668, that help to account for their having been so consistently sought after. They also convey the illusion of being transcriptions of particular spots, yet the way in which they share and juggle the same elements shows that this cannot have been so. This picture was another of the fine Dutch paintings acquired by Baron Lionel de Rothschild. In this particular case he seems to have bought it directly from a member of another distinguished banking family, probably Alexander Baring, Baron Ashburton (1835-1889). It had originally been acquired by his grandfather Alexander Baring (1774-1848), created 1st Baron Ashburton in 1835 after a brief period as President of the Board of Trade. He had formed a distinguished collection of pictures, which was housed in part in his great neo-classical mansion, The Grange, which had been built for another banker, Henry Drummond, by William Wilkins in 1805-9, and which was successively enlarged for him by Sir Robert Smirke around 1818, and by C.R. Cockerell in 1823-25; and in part in his London mansion, Bath House, No.82, Piccadilly, which was remodelled for him by Henry Harrison in 1821. It was in this last that the bulk and finest pieces of his collection were kept, and it was there that Waagen saw them. From his description, it is clear that it was, as he says "one of the most select in England" - the country that at that time had the greatest wealth of collections in the world. It included some good Italian High Renaissance and Seicento pictures, including Correggio's Four Saints (Metropolitan Museum, New York) that he had bought privately from the 3rd Lord Berwick, and four Murillos; but "the real strength of the collection" lay in its unrivalled holdings of the Flemish and Dutch Schools, which were astonishing in sheer quantity alone: four paintings by Rubens, five by Teniers, five by Rembrandt, four by Cuyp, five by Wouwerman, and no less than seven by the Ostades. The collector himself was dead when Waagen saw his collection, but: "Happily his son, the present Lord Ashburton, has inherited with the collection the taste to appreciate and the desire to increase it". Both he and his brother, who succeeded him as 3rd Baron, seem to have retained, and possibly to have added to, their father's collection, but the 3rd Baron's son appears to have begun the process of dissolution, whether by private sales, as in the case of the present picture, or by the outright auction of a portion of it, at Christie's in 1872 [June 1872, & those of July 1905 & (Melchett Ct.) Sept. 1911]. Quite why he should have done so is something of a mystery, since it was not until 1893 that the crash of Baring's Bank dealt a severe blow to the fortunes of all the branches of the family, and no doubt contributed to the dispersal of the remaining parts of the collection in 1905 and 1911. Waagen further noticed that the 2nd Baron "belongs to that philanthropic and amiable class who have real pleasure in allowing others to enjoy their treasures of art", and that one of the others to do so at the luncheon he attended in 1851 was Macaulay. Lit: John Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, 1835, vol.VI, no.115; G.F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, 1854, p.111; C. Hofstede de Groot, 1912, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the most eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 1912, vol.IV, no.220; The Ascott Collection, The National Trust, 1963, No.47, p.30 & pl. (entry by F.St. John Gore) (revised 1974; reprinted 1980); Christopher White, The Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge, 1982, no.67, p.50 & pl.55. Notes: (i) A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth-Century, vol. IV , p.351. (ii) cf. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott 1828-31, ed. H.J.C. Grierson, 1936, pp.121-22, quoted by John Pope-Hennessy, Burlington Magazine, LXXIV (1939), p. 67 [CHECK BOTH]. (iii) And not only collectors: vide John Crome's reputed last words: "Oh Hobbima, my dear Hobbima, how I have loved you!", uttered with his yees fixed on the Roadside Inn then in the collection of their reporter, Dawson Turner; and now in the Bührle Collection in Zurich (cf. exh.cat. Dutch and Flemish Painting in Norfolk, Castle Museum, Norwich, 1988, no.59. (iv) Hofstede de Groot, no. 181; Georges Broulhiet, Meindert Hobbema, Paris, 1938, no.268, p.413 & pl. p.236. (v) Hofstede de Groot, no. 184. (vi) No. 995; Hofstede de Groot, no. 162; Broulhiet, no. 269; Neil McClaren, revised by Christopher Brown, The Dutch School 1600-1900, The National Gallery, 1991, p.182 & pl. 162. (vii) Hofstede de Groot, no. 114; Broulhiet, no. 209, p.404 & pl. p. 206. (viii) Hofstede de Groot, nos. 172 & 46; Broulhiet, nos. 192 & 197; for the Elkins picture (first recorded as having long been in the family possession of Sir Richard Ford) cf. exh. cat. Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting, Boston Museum of Fine Arts &c., 1987, no.44. (ix) Hofstede de Groot, no. 220; Broulhiet, no.189, p.401 & pl.p.196. (x) Hofstede de Groot, no.42; Broulhiet, no.193; Bernice Davidson, Paintings in the Frick Collection, vol.I (1968), pp.222-24. (xi) Hofstede de Groot, no.118; Broulhiet, no.208; Catalogue of the Paintings, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, vol.I (1960) Dutch & Flemish, by H. Gerson & J.W. Goodison, no.49, p.62 & pl.32. (xii) Hofstede de Groot, no.78; Broulhiet, no.274; Christopher White, The Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge, 1982, no.67, p.50 & pl.55.