A Wood near The Hague, with a view of the Huis ten Bosch

For years, scholars could not agree on who was responsible for this landscape. As early as 1927, the Dutch painter Jan van Kessel (1641–80) was suggested as its author, and this has been confirmed recently with the discovery of a preparatory sketch for the central oak tree in this painting. Just to the left of the centre of the painting is a building with a large dome: this is the Huis ten Bosch, a royal palace in the Hague in the Netherlands which was built between 1645 and 1652 for Amalia van Solms-Braunfels, the Princess of Orange (1602–75). Amalia was an influential political figure, as the widow of the Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and she was a major art collector and patron. 

Jan van Kessel (1641–80) was a Dutch landscape painter who worked in the circle of the Dutch artist, Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–82). Ruisdael was a successful painter in his own lifetime, and was known for rejecting the then-fashionable Italianate landscape trend. With the gnarled branches of the central oak and the felled tree in the foreground of this work, along with the Huis ten Bosch, Van Kessel also looks away from idealised Italian landscapes, seeking instead to depict local Dutch terrain and landmarks.