Meindert hobbema
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Watermills were a favourite motif.
In 1668, Hobbema married, and in the same year took up the post of municipal wine-gauger which involved the weighing and measuring of imported wines. With a wife, a job and a salary his painting output slowed down considerably - but he did produce his most famous work, 'The Avenue at Middelharnis', in 1689, twenty years after having given up art as a profession.
The last years of Hobbema's life were harsh.
And yet, when he uses subdued tones, and aims at a monochromatic effect, he is unrivalled, as in The Windmills (Petit Palais, Paris) or Oak Trees by a Pond (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), where he brings a virtuoso's touch to the play of reflections. These landscapes (together with a few rare examples of his drawing in the Rijksmuseum, the Teyler Museum in Haarlem and the Petit Palais in Paris) all appear to date from before 1669.
His obsessive search for technical perfection sometimes causes Hobbema to lapse into the stereotyped, as is seen in his taste for variations on the same theme.
He specialised in elaborate woodland scenes, often large-scale compositions animated with small figures and repeated in several variants. In France, Hobbema had a noticable impact on the work of Theodore Rousseau (1812-67) and Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-1878). They and his other pictures exerted a huge influence on the development of both the English School (1770-1850) and the Barbizon School of landscape painting (1830-75).
In fact, the backgrounds to Hobbema's landscapes are too detailed; they lack the sense of infinity and the great vistas found in Ruisdael.
Hobbema remained unaffected, too, by the lyricism of the pre-Romantic era. Hobbema's paintings are particularly well represented in English collections, and in some of the best art museums in both Europe and America.
Meindert Hobbema
Hobbema was born in Amsterdam in 1638, the son of a carpenter.
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Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709)
Early Paintings
Few of Hobbema's landscapes represent a real locale. For all this, there is a naturalism and an intimate sense of the poetry of nature in his work which emerges with strength and simplicity in such paintings as Landscape in Sunshine (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), The Cottage by the River's Edge (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), View of Deventer (Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague) and A Road Winding Past Cottages (National Gallery, London).
A characteristic melancholy emerges from these landscapes with their cold greens and dark, dank waters.
Legacy and Influence
Some of his most famous landscape paintings were painted after 1669, such as The Ruins of Brederode Castle (1671, National Gallery, London) and The Avenue, Middelharnis (1689, National Gallery, London).
At the age of 15, he and his younger brother and sister are recorded as having been sent to an orphanage. From time to time, also, he will disrupt the harmony of a landscape by too crude a light in an attempt to penetrate the mystery of Ruisdael's luminosity, or be tempted to heighten the greens, browns and blues by the crimson splash of a tiled roof - something which became quite common in his work.
The foliage in paintings such as the Landscape with Forest near Haarlem (1663, Museum of Ancient Art, Brussels), The Forest (1664, Hermitage, St Petersburg) or The Village among Trees (1665, Frick Collection, New York) is defined with extreme precision. The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam (National Gallery, London), one of his rare urban views, was probably painted in 1662.
Style of Realist Landscape Painting
In the landscapes painted during his maturity, Hobbema's style began to develop in a manner quite unlike that of Ruisdael.
Instead they abound with motifs inspired by the earlier compositions of Ruisdael, in whose footsteps Hobbema followed until around 1664. In England, those most influenced by Hobbema included Richard Wilson (1714-82), Samuel Scott (1710-72), John Crome (1768-1821) and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), of the Norwich school of landscape painters, Patrick Nasmyth (1786-1831), and the great John Constable (1776-1837), as well as the early landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88).
The Landscapes of 1659 (Fine Arts Museum, Grenoble; National Gallery, Edinburgh) are derived from Ruisdael, to whom he again turned for inspiration in 1660, in his forest landscapes: A Woody Landscape with a Cottage (National Gallery, London) and The Edge of the Woods, with Farm (1662, Alte Pinakothek, Munich).
His earliest known work, Landscape with River (1658, Detroit Institute of Arts), was a favourite subject of the young artist.