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]
- ^ Langmuir, 205
- ^ Lörzing, 42
- ^ Lloyd, 77
- ^ Lloyd, 77
- ^ Levey, 151
- ^ Slive, 207
- ^ Reitlinger, 338 (now the NG only recognises 9 Hobbemas in total in its collection)
- ^ Levey, 151; MacLaren, 177; Slive, 206
- ^ Levey, 151
- ^ MacLaren, 177
- ^ MacLaren, 175; Slive, 206
- ^ Langmuir, 205; Slive, 206–207, and the rest of his chapter.