View in the Woods

A great old oak stands at the centre of this forest, and in its shade a few herders rest with their sheep and cows while a stream runs past on the left. Barend Cornelis Koekkoek painted trees like this again and again, and the Rijksmuseum calls them his Wodan oaks, after the old Germanic god. German Romantic painters and poets had long treated the oak as the tree of the native forest, and Koekkoek gave this one the full width of a big canvas, 160 centimetres across, signed and dated 1848.

The painting reached Amsterdam in 1891 as a gift from Baron du Bois de Ferrières, a Dutch-born collector who had settled in England, served as mayor and member of parliament for Cheltenham, and later gave money and paintings to found the art gallery there.