HOBBEMA, Meyndert

Hobbema’s fame rests on a group of landscapes painted between 1662 and 1668, most of which are composed along similar lines to the present example, with a hamlet of thatched timber-framed farmhouses nestling under oak trees growing in thin, sandy soil.

At the beginning of the 1660s, Hobbema and his teacher, Jacob van Ruisdael went o a study trip together through the provinces of Gelderland and Twenthe, where there were many watermills. It was on that journey that they must have studied the unidentified watermill in the two pictures now in the Rijksmuseum, for there are several drawings of it by both artists, which they used as the basis for paintings back in their Amsterdam studios. The two views are of one and the same watermill.

Meindert Hobbema produced more than 30 paintings of watermills, more than any other Dutch painter.

At the beginning of the 1660s, Hobbema and his teacher, Jacob van Ruisdael went o a study trip together through the provinces of Gelderland and Twenthe, where there were many watermills. It was on that journey that they must have studied the unidentified watermill in the two pictures now in the Rijksmuseum, for there are several drawings of it by both artists, which they used as the basis for paintings back in their Amsterdam studios. The two views are of one and the same watermill.

Meindert Hobbema produced more than 30 paintings of watermills, more than any other Dutch painter.

Hobbema was a pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael and together with him was one of the most important of the realist landscape painters. His work reveals his debt to his master, whom he followed closely in his early works to the point that many of them are impossible to distinguish from those by Ruisdael. Little by little, however, he developed his own style. His paintings depict local scenes in which the vegetation is less dense than in Ruisdael’s compositions, and, generally speaking, his landscapes lack the romantic tone which characterized his master’s works. The mood of Hobbema’s landscapes is usually one of calm. Hobbema was especially admired by 17th- and 18th-century English collectors, and his work consequently exercised an important influence on British landscape painting.

Hobbema was Jacob van Ruisdael’s most important follower and his only documented pupil. In the beginning the influence of the older master is unmistakable. In 1663 Hobbema’s style gained more independence and, during this and the following years up to 1668, he created a series of masterpieces which gave him an outstanding position side by side with Ruisdael among the great landscapists of Holland.

Hobbema’s outlook on nature is less brooding, more sunny, and vivacious than Ruisdael’s. While the latter favoured compactness of form and composition, Hobbema’s tree groups are less tightly built, and their silhouettes are rather feathery. He likes to open up his compositions with various outlooks into a shiny distance, and his luminous skies of an intense white and blue permeate the whole with sparkling daylight. Hobbema’s painterly touch is more fluid, and the colours are richly varied in an interplay of bright green and light brown, fine greys, and reds. Often an appealing blond tonality prevails.

Although this painting is painted in the careful, precise manner typical of Dutch realist painting from the 17th century, it is not an exact description of a specific country view. The details have been selected and arranged to make a more pleasing scene. The figures and the buildings add to the human interest, while the small and precise detail of the plant forms give it a sense of authenticity.

This panel is an early work by Hobbema, displaying a formative and elegant style not yet fully under the direct influence of his teacher Jacob van Ruisdael.

In composition and execution, this panel is closely related to a group of paintings by Hobbema, which depicts the artist’s main theme of quiet village life.

Hobbema was a Dutch landscape painter. He worked in his native Amsterdam, where he was the friend and only documented pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael. Some of his pictures are very like Ruisdael’s, but his range was more limited and he lacked the latter’s power to capture the majesty of nature.

Marshy Wood dates from a period when Hobbema was starting to move away from Ruisdael’s style. Although the subject is inspired by a print by his teacher, Hobbema uses a thicker brushstroke and the trees are rendered in a highly personal manner, with twisted trunks and a very detailed drawing of the branches and foliage in a nervous style. The artist’s brush becomes subtle and highly detailed in the foreground, capturing the nuances of light as they fall on the trees and the vibrations and reflections in the water.

Meindert Hobbema was born in Amsterdam and was a pupil there of the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael. Ruisdael had moved to Amsterdam from his native Haarlem by 1657 and Hobbema must have entered his studio shortly thereafter. Hobbema’s technique in the depiction of landscape and his choice of forest scenes are derived from his master, but Hobbema’s landscapes do not possess the grandeur or the threatening and even melancholy aspect of Ruisdael’s. Hobbema’s is a reassuringly docile vision of landscape, a town-dweller’s account of the beauty of the countryside. It is an essentially decorative view, an anticipation of the rococo landscapes of the eighteenth century.

The Road on a Dyke shows him placing themes taken from Ruisdael - the pool surrounded by trees, the large over-arching oak dominating the landscape; the country path rutted by the wheels of waggons - in an open, sunlit landscape. The figures and cattle in the right foreground are probably by Adriaen van de Velde, who often collaborated with Hobbema and other landscape painters.

Hobbema’s career is a reminder of how precarious a living was to be made from painting in Holland in the seventeenth century. In 1668 Hobbema was appointed to the post of wine-gauger to the Amsterdam guild of wine-importers, through his marriage to the maidservant of a burgomaster in Amsterdam. Although by no means an exalted position, the job did at least guarantee a regular income, and Hobbema almost gave up painting entirely: However, it was during these years that he produced some of his finest works, including The Avenue at Middelharnis, painted in 1689.

Hobbema painted a narrow range of favourite subjects over and over again. In 1668 he became a wine gauger with the Amsterdam customs and excise, and thereafter seems to have painted only in his spare time. His new position, which he held until the end of his life, probably accounts for the slackening and a certain unevenness in his production during his late decades. A few works of this later period show his compositions broken up into too many detailed areas. The trees acquire an almost linear sharpness, and the pictorial effect hardens.

Yet there are some notable exceptions, one of which almost seems a miracle, because in this work Hobbema not only revives his old grandeur, but surpasses himself as a composer and painter of the Dutch countryside. This is the rightly famous The Alley at Middelharnis. It does not take away from the glory of this picture that there are precedents in Dutch landscape painting that date back for the first decades of the century for the conception of a strongly foreshortened road lined with trees in a wide flat landscape.

Hobbema altered earlier schemes by centralizing the whole composition, focusing interest on the middle and far distance as well as the immediate foreground with its uncultivated grove on one side and an orderly arrangement of saplings on the other, and by the unprecedented height of the lopped, thin trees which carry interest to the towering sky (regrettably, the sky was extensively damaged before the picture was acquired by the gallery in 1871; much of its paint surface is the work of modern restorers). The painting offers a topographically accurate view of the village of Middelharnis on the island of Over Flakee (Province of South Holland) in the mouth of the Maas; the view of the village from the Steene Weg (formerly Boomgaardweg) looks much the same today. This masterpiece is the swan song of Holland’s great period of landscape painting which fully deserves its high reputation.

A friend and pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, Hobbema and his teacher often made sketching trips together into the countryside near Amsterdam, later using their drawings as studies for paintings. On occasion the same scene would appear in works by both artists, for the old mill in this painting is also found in a painting by Ruisdael in Amsterdam. Even though the scenes might be similar, the paintings would differ greatly in style, for Hobbema approached landscape more as a reporter, and Ruisdael more as a poet.

Hobbema was Jacob van Ruisdael’s most important follower and his only documented pupil. In the beginning the influence of the older master is unmistakable. In 1663 Hobbema’s style gained more independence and, during this and the following years up to 1668, he created a series of masterpieces which gave him an outstanding position side by side with Ruisdael among the great landscapists of Holland.

Hobbema’s favoured motifs are sunny forest scenes opened by roads and glistening ponds, fairly flat landscapes with scattered tree groups, and water mills. He had a special love for the last named subject; almost three dozen paintings of his water mills are known.

Hobbema’s favoured motifs are sunny forest scenes opened by roads and glistening ponds, fairly flat landscapes with scattered tree groups, and water mills. He had a special love for the last named subject; almost three dozen paintings of his water mills are known.

No one landscape painter of the Northern Low Countries has repeated the motif of water mills as often as Meindert Hobbema. More than 30 paintings treating this theme are known and are considered to represent some of his finest work. This theme, which was finally to become a sort of trade mark of Hobbema’s work, was not, however, his own discovery, but that of his teacher Jacob van Ruisdael. Of the latter it is known with certainty that in the 1650s he travelled through the eastern provinces of Gelderland and Overijssel. There he made four drawings of the overhead water mills with the water brought along an elevated wooden gulley that are typical for the region, as also depicted here by Hobbema. Two similar drawings by Hobbema are preserved, but it remains unclear whether these were made in situ or based on Ruisdael’s observations. With the exception of one painting, the world-famous Alley at Middelharnis, the origin of which remains swathed in mystery, Hobbema produced all his masterpieces within a very short period between 1663 and 1668.

The present unsigned and undated panel fits into this series. Following his appointment to the well-paid function of wine-gauger of the city of Amsterdam, Hobbema in 1668 largely or totally gave up his painter’s career: no dated work is known after 1669. Hobbema is frequently portrayed as the highly gifted but more superficial and less imaginative successor to Ruisdael and who, in his Amsterdam studio, specialised in wooded landscapes built up around a pond or a winding pathway. Invariably vistas between the tree allow us to see through to sun-drenched areas. Hobbema developed carefully balanced views of rural sites of the kind that became very popular with 19th century English and French romantic artists and in this way escaped oblivion. The definition “picturesque landscape” appears very appropriate for views like those of Hobbema.

Meindert Hobbema, Jacob van Ruisdael’s pupil, was the last of the major Dutch landscapists. He had ceased painting by the 1660s, when the demand for these magisterial images was all but gone. The art market collapsed in the 1670s.

This is an imaginary landscape based on real elements.

This early landscape by Hobbema testifies to the painter’s predilection for wooded landscapes with sunlight filtering through the trees. He often painted variations on a theme: again and again he painted trees along sandy roads or around a watermill, always from a different perspective.

This is a mature picture of the artist, depicting a wooded landscape with travellers on a track by a cottage, a rider and his dogs on the right, and two peasants and a horse-drawn cart on the left. In many of his mature works Hobbema depicts the predominately wooded landscape and characteristic timber-framed vernacular architecture of Gelderland and other parts of the Eastern Netherlands.

Hobbema’s favoured motifs are sunny forest scenes opened by roads and glistening ponds, fairly flat landscapes with scattered tree groups, and water mills. He had a special love for the last named subject; almost three dozen paintings of his water mills are known. None of his contemporaries painted as many. It was his teacher Jacob van Ruisdael who first made the motif the principal subject of landscapes. The overshot water mill that figures in Hobbema’s characteristic landscape was the type found in the eastern province of Gelderland that flanks the German border.

In the early seventeenth century the dominant trend in Dutch landscape painting was for harmonious and flat coastal scenes, exemplified by in the work of Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael. In the second half of the century, however, there was a tendency to dramatize nature, as in the night scenes by Aert van der Neer and Jacob van Ruisdael’s romantically dramatic paintings of ruins, cascading waterfalls and stormy weather.

Meyndert Hobbema was a pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael and followed the dramatic landscape tradition. One of his favourite motifs was the landscape with watermill. At least thirty paintings by him depict watermills in different landscape surroundings and from different perspectives. The present painting is a typical example.

In this painting, a country road curves around the marsh to the left. Farmhouses are visible among the trees straight ahead and to the right, where a woman at a Dutch door appears to be looking at the travelers.