The Avenue at Middelharnis

It shows a road leading to the village of Middelharnis on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee in the Meuse (Dutch: Maas) delta in South Holland, the Netherlands.

[3] Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the great specialist of a century ago, thought it "the finest picture, next to Rembrandt's Syndics, which has been painted in Holland".

[7] The untypically symmetrical and frontal composition of the painting appears to record very accurately the view Hobbema saw;[8] the alder trees along the road were planted in 1664.

[9] It is signed and dated in the reflection on the ditch at right: "M:hobbema/f 1689", [10] over twenty years after Hobbema largely gave up painting,[11] and right at the end of the Dutch Golden Age landscape period.

The top of the church tower has been rebuilt, and the spire was removed by the French in 1811 to make a semaphore station, connecting The Hague with Paris.

[14] The village lies on the edge of the island and was a fishing port; ships' masts and a beacon with a tripod support can be seen in the distance to the right of the avenue, on the beach facing the Haringvliet.

Hobbema specialized in "sunny forest scenes opened by roads and glistening ponds, fairly flat landscapes with scattered tree groups, and water mills", including over thirty of the last in paintings.

[22] The unusually centralized composition carries the viewer's eye down the road, and the thin, very tall lopped trees unite the sky and the land.

[23] The "dark patches of ground and vegetation to the left and right of the road echo and reinforce the horizon line and counteract the inward pull of the perspective.

[26] For Seymour Slive the painting has "the exalted spaciousness which often characterizes the Late Baroque, and also a kind of elegance in the elongated, slender trees that goes with the taste of this phase".

It was exhibited at the British Institution in 1835, and in March 1871 entered the National Gallery as NG 830 when they bought seventy-seven pictures and eighteen drawings from the Peel Collection.

[35] The Avenue, Sydenham by Camille Pissarro was painted during a stay in London that ended in June 1871, a month after the National Gallery acquired the Hobbema, and its composition is probably influenced by it.