A Farm among Trees

Jan van der Heyden is known for townscapes in which every brick and windowpane is set down, and this is the only landscape by him in the National Gallery. It is tiny, about 22 by 29 centimetres, and painted around 1670 it works almost against his usual habits. The building, a brick farmhouse, is half hidden behind a screen of trees, so you get only a hazy sense of its walls and roof. The care went into the foliage instead, where many of the leaves are picked out one by one. Down by the pool, a figure on the bank and a few cattle are hard to make out in the shade, and the water gives back only the dark shapes of trees and walls. The panel came to the Gallery in 1876, in the bequest of the collector Wynn Ellis.