Meindert Hobbema
31 October 1638 – 7 December 1709) was a Dutch Golden Age painter of landscapes, specializing in views of woodland, although his most famous painting, The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689, National Gallery, London), shows a different type of scene.
Hobbema was a pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and in his mature period produced paintings developing one aspect of his master's more varied output, specializing in "sunny forest scenes opened by roads and glistening ponds, fairly flat landscapes with scattered tree groups, and water mills", including over 30 of the last in paintings.
He spent a period in an orphanage from 1653, but by about two years later he had left, and soon became the only documented pupil of the leading Amsterdam landscapist, Jacob van Ruisdael, whose influence was to dominate his work.
[4] Hobbema married at the age of 30, to Eeltje Vinck from Gorcum, a maidservant to the burgomaster Lambert Reynst, at this point an important political figure in the "republican" Dutch States Party as brother-in-law to the De Graeff brothers (but soon to lose office and influence in the Rampjaar of 1672).
[6] Also in 1668, and presumably through the connection with his wife's ex-employer, he took the well-paid position of "wine-gauger" for the Amsterdam octroi, assessing and collecting local taxes on wine, holding this until his death.
[7] After 1672 the Dutch art market "virtually collapsed" for the rest of the century, and other artists of his approximate generation produced much less, including Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch and Nicolaes Berchem.
[8] The Hobbema family lived in the Rozengracht in the Jordaan neighbourhood, as had Rembrandt in his later and impoverished days, as well as Adam Pynacker, Jacob van Loo, Cornelis Holsteyn and other artists.
From around 1662 the influence of Jacob van Ruisdael becomes much stronger, and Hobbema settled into his speciality of wooded landscapes, very often with ponds, roads, and a building or two.
[22] Hobbema is not mentioned by Arnold Houbraken,[23] the Vasari of the Dutch Golden Age, or indeed any literary source during his lifetime at all,[24] and his work rarely appears in early auction catalogues, fetching little when it does.
The Avenue at Middelharnis remains in near-universal favour, placed in a category by itself: "it is as if the artist had produced only a single picture" according to Christopher Lloyd.
[28] The situation is not helped by the surprising lack of art historical scholarship on him; there has not been a monograph since 1938, and that received a savage review from Neil MacLaren, the National Gallery's Dutch specialist.
[29] Kenneth Clark thought that "an artist as skillful as Hobbema grows tedious, because the elaboratedly described trees in his woodland scenes are not subordinated to a general principle of light".
