Meindert Hobbema

Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709)

Meindert Hobbema (bapt. October 31, 1638 – December 7, 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.

The majority of his mature works come from the 1660s; after he married and took a job as an exciseman in 1668 he painted less, and after 1689 apparently not at all. He was not very well known in his lifetime or for nearly a century after his death, but became steadily more popular from the last decades of the 18th century until the 20th century.

Hobbema is not mentioned by Arnold Houbraken, the Vasari of the Dutch Golden Age, or indeed any literary source during his lifetime at all, and his work rarely appears in early auction catalogues, fetching little when it does. The English, and to some extent the French, were more appreciative of his work than the Dutch in the 18th century, and a large number of his works left Holland. His style had become influential and respected by the Romantic period, and began to climb in value, especially in England. He was loved by John Constable, John Crome and the Norwich School of painters, all of whom he influenced.

By the 1820s prices could be over £1,000, and by 1900 over £10,000. A record price of £33,000 (equivalent) was reached in 1933 with a sale to America of a work from the Jan Six collection. The highest recent prices include a painting now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, sold in December 1995 for £3.74 million (illustrated above), and a larger picture now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, sold in July 2001 for £6.5 million, both at Sotheby's.

Hobbema's modern critical reputation is equivocal, with several critics expressing a degree of boredom with his woodland scenes, while others are more appreciative. 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. 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 sava