Despite his apprenticeship with Jacob van Ruysdael, Hobbema's earliest paintings, from the late 1650s, are mostly river scenes more in the style of Cornelis Vroom and Salomon van Ruysdael. From around 1662 the influence of Jacob van Ruysdael becomes much stronger, and Hobbema settled into his speciality of wooded landscapes, very often with ponds, roads, and a building or two. Even within the Dutch painting of his day, where specialization in a particular type of subject-matter had become normal, his concentration on such a specific subject was rather unusual.