Hobbema, Meindert Lubbertzsoon

Dutch landscape painter. A pupil of Ruisdael, his early work is derivative, but later works are characteristically realistic and unsentimental. His best-known work is The Avenue, Middelharnis (1689; National Gallery, London).

He is thought to have been the pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, with whose work Hobbema's has several points of similarity, though he did not possess Ruisdael's range. He was the outstanding interpreter of the Dutch rural picturesque in the second half of the 17th century, painting woods, water mills, winding tracks, streams and cottages with delightful sympathy. There is much that is obscure about his career and the chronology of his work. He obtained a post in the excise at 30, and it has been assumed that he then gave up painting, with the superb exception of his masterpiece, The Avenue, Middelharnis. If, with this one exception, he did not paint during 40 years of his life, it cannot have been because of the security given by his post, as he died in poverty and was buried in the pauper section of an Amsterdam cemetery. His works are now widely distributed in the world's galleries.