Wolfgang Stechow notes in his major 1966 survey of Dutch 17th century landscape painting, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century : “Philips Wouwerman’s rather rare winter landscapes are little known today… But there exist a number of beautifully intimate, spontaneously conceived and executed small panels which are closer in mood and quality to those of Ruisdael than are any others. No date occurs on any of them but there is little doubt that the majority belongs to the early and middle sixties, which would make them exact contemporaries of those of Ruisdael.” Our painting, however, was executed many years earlier.

This vertical winter scene is dominated by a great dead tree, silhouetted dramatically against an expanse of sky, in which louring banks of cloud reveal glimpses of blue and the whitish radiance of the winter sun. A wood cutter hacks off branches from the tree with an axe, while another figure saws the branches in the left foreground, where two pollard willows stand. In the mid-ground, the figures of a woman with children approach on the curving, country road. In the background, the figures of two peasants can be seen conversing over the fence of a farm, while beyond them, on the distant horizon, one can glimpse a cottage with a smoking chimney and one or two trees. The farm has a ramshackle appearance, with an unevenly slanting roof. Behind it stands the village church. The landscape is dusted with snow. Limited to predominant shades of brown and grey, Wouwerman’s palette is heightened only with white and grey for the snow, and one or two patches of blue for the sky.

The present work relates to a painting in the Musée J.-P. Pescatore, Luxemburg (inv. no. 377), which features the same village view, as well as to a painting in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, (inv. 900F). These works, datable to circa 1655, share the fine airy, grey atmosphere of the present painting.

Philips Wouwerman was a prolific artist, producing more than one thousand paintings. He had a successful career as a painter during his lifetime, but his works enjoyed even greater popularity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century amongst aristocratic collectors and important museums in St Petersburg, Dresden and The Hague, all of which contain a large number of his works. He is particularly associated with the painting of horses, which feature in hunting scenes, cavalry battles and views of army camps.

Philips Wouwerman was the eldest son of Pouwels Wouwerman (d. 1642) and his fourth wife, Susanna van den Bogert. Philips may have had his first painting lessons from his father. According to the writer Cornelis de Bie (1627-1711/16), Philips was next apprenticed to

Frans Hals’ (1581/5-1666) studio, although there is no visible influence of Hals’ style in Wouwerman’s work. According to the German painter Mathias Scheits (1625/30-c.1700), Philips worked for some weeks in Hamburg in 1638 or 1639, in the studio of the German history painter Evert Decker (d. 1647). In 1640, the artist returned to Haarlem where he entered the Guild of St Luke. During the 1640s much of Wouwerman’s work was influenced by the Haarlem painter Pieter van Laer (circa 1592/95-1642), in its southern aspects and treatment of cattle and horses. His landscapes from this period were dominated by a diagonal hill or dune, with a tree acting as repoussoir, and a few rather large figures, usually with horses.