Ferme sous les Arbres

Willem Roelofs 1822 - 1897

Summary

The 19th century Dutch landscape painter Willem Roelofs generally selected sites with water, but this simple country scene is nonetheless entirely characteristic of his style. A thatched barn, protected by tall trees, lies beyond a broken wooden fence that runs across the middle ground. Sheep graze the foreground meadow. There is a bright blue sky with scattered clouds. Roelofs was active in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Brussels, where he exhibited successfully at the Salon. He was one of the first Hague School painters to visit the artists' colony of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris, and his work owes a clear debt to the naturalistic style of French contemporaries, such as Charles-François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau. Like them, Roelofs sketched from nature and worked up his observations into finished paintings in his studio, but the absence of obvious idealisation and the relatively loose handling help to convey the impression that they have been painted in situ in the space of a few hours.