This early 19th-century oil painting by Gerrit Hendrik Göbel (1786-1833) presents a tranquil rural landscape, plausibly in the region of Salland. Painted during the formative years of Dutch Romanticism, it shows Göbel working with both the clarity inherited from the 17th-century Dutch masters and the warmth and sentiment that defined the early Romantic mood. The scene unfolds beside a gently winding river, bordered by dense foliage and timbered cottages that seem to grow naturally from the landscape.
A father and son appear on a sunlit path in the foreground, their presence understated yet quietly expressive. The father kneels to tie his shoelace, absorbed in a simple task, while his son stands beside him, looking out through an opening in the trees towards a distant, illuminated horizon. Göbel captures a moment of shared stillness, yet also a moment of divergence: the father grounded in the familiar, the son already drawn to the world beyond the path. The contrast is subtle but evocative, reflecting the generational rhythms embedded in rural life.
Göbel’s characteristic gentleness shapes the composition. He favours breadth and harmony over drama, arranging trees, water, and sky into a natural, lived-in order. The cottages nestle into the foliage as though they belong to it; the river follows the easy course of the land; the warm light settles softly across the valley. His brushwork is detailed yet atmospheric, descriptive without rigidity - a balance typical of Dutch Romantic painters who sought to preserve the countryside as they knew it.
Göbel’s own story deepens the scene’s resonance. Raised in a large working family in Raalte, and taught first by his father, he understood the landscape as the setting of daily life rather than as spectacle. Early 19th-century Salland was a world of hollow roads, heathland, drifting sands, and rural labour - a landscape soon to change with modernisation. He painted at the threshold of this transition, and his works now read as quiet acts of preservation, capturing the countryside and its generational bonds before they shifted into memory.
This painting sits comfortably within his oeuvre, reflecting both his affection for the land of his birth and the compositional language he carried from Dutch Golden Age precedents. It feels intimate, observant, and sincere - a record of the rural world as he experienced it and wished to retain.
Signed and dated in the lower left. Held in a 19th-century gilt composition frame with foliate.
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Medium: Oil on canvas
Overall size: 31” x 26½” / 79cm x 67cm
Year of creation: 1820
Labels & Inscriptions: Newman & Cooling gallery label.
Provenance: With Newman & Cooling, London / Private collection, UK.
Condition: Cleaned. Canvas relined. Craquelure throughout. Later stretcher. The paint layer is stable. Frame in good condition with minor age-related wear.
Artist’s auction maximum: £26,550 for ‘A Wooded Winter Landscape with Several Skaters on a Frozen Waterway (1829)', Oil on canvas, Christie’s, 19th Century European Pictures, Watercolours And Drawings, Amsterdam, 21 April 1994 (lot 294).
Our reference: BRV2230
