Protestant Holland in the 17th century had very different artistic traditions to the rest of Catholic Europe. Painters in Italy were called on to create elaborate mythical works, or spectacular religious paintings for their Catholic churches. Dutch churches were plain and whitewashed. Artists had to look elsewhere for their inspiration, and their income. Landscape painting (often created for private clients) was a genre in which they excelled.

Holland boasted a number of great landscape painters, who tended to specialise in a particular type of scene. Hobbema was best known for woodland scenes and watermills. His early teacher, Jacob van Ruisdael, specialised in darker, wilder woodland scenes, while Willem van de Velde painted seascapes and ships.

Even when painting a real place, painters felt under no obligation to stick to the facts. If changing the shape of a church roof, or moving a building, or a tree, or an entire hill, helped the composition of a work, then they did so. Idealised, partially imagined landscapes were even considered artistically superior to topographically accurate ones.

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