A landscape with figures by a river and mountains in the distance

Born in Amsterdam in 1768, Hendrik Voogd enrolled in the local Academy in 1783 and completed his training with the painter Jurriaan Andriessen. In 1788, the well-to-do Amsterdam collector Dirk Versteegh provided funding for Voogd to travel to Rome to further his studies in landscape painting. Voogd would remain in Italy, save for a brief return to Amsterdam in 1828. In Italy, he befriended other foreign landscapists, including Nicolas-Didier Boguet, Johann Christian Reinhart and Johann Martin von Rohden. Like these artists, Voogd’s work evoked the Arcadian ideals of Claude Lorrain, which earned him the nickname 'the Dutch Claude Lorrain’.

The present painting is probably synonymous with the work described in Versteegh’s 1823 estate auction as ‘Un Paysage montagneux, au premier plan un homme avec un chien; bel effect du soleil,’ one of four paintings by the artist to feature in Versteegh's sale.