Hobbema, Meindert - Avenue at Middelharnis - art postcard

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^{Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :}

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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.

Wooobbema 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.[1]

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.

The Avenue at Middelharnis is a Dutch Golden Age painting of 1689 by Meindert Hobbema, now in the National Gallery, London. It is in oil on canvas and measures 103.5 by 141 centimetres (40.7 in × 55.5 in). 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.

The painting has long been one of the best-known Dutch landscape paintings,[1] and certainly Hobbema's best-known work,[2] at least in the English-speaking world: "it is as if the artist had produced only a single picture" according to Christopher Lloyd.[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".[4] According to Michael Levey, "it occupies a position in painting somewhat equivalent to that in poetry of Gray's Elegy,[5] and for Seymour Slive "it is the swan song of Holland's great period of landscape painting which fully deserves its high reputation."[6] For Gerald Reitlinger, it "soars above the other nine National Gallery Hobbemas".[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.[12]