If we today look south from the village of Vinderød, we will have no difficulty in recognising the motif of this picture. A yellow house with red tiled roof can still be seen at the foot of the forested Høbjerg. It is now a forester’s house, but in those days it was the official residence of the Commander of the Rocket Corps – a post that Lundbye’s father, Colonel Joachim Theodor Lundbye, occupied from 1836 to his death in 1841. The narrow, greyish white house, which in the picture can be seen in the thicket on the left of the parents’ house is, however, no longer to be found. It was an observatory, long ago pulled down.
There is something to suggest that this picture was painted as a companion piece to Landscape at Arresø with a View across the Shifting Sand Hills at Tisvilde. To begin with, the two paintings are exactly the same size, and secondly the low horizons are on a level with each other, and thirdly the two motifs can easily have been painted from exactly the same spot in Vindrød. In the painting of the shifting sand hills, Lundbye is simply looking to the north. In the picture of his parents’ house he has turned 180 degrees and is looking south. Perhaps it was this relationship that persuaded Thorvaldsen to buy this painting.
