Stop and Look – The Avenue, Middelharnis by Meindert Hobbema (1689)
The Amsterdam-born painter Meindert Hobbema was not by any means the most famous of the Dutch landscape painters in his own age and country, and it was really in other places, especially England in the eighteenth century, that he became celebrated as the archetypal painter of the Dutch countryside. His greatest strength was the informal irregularity of his compositions, the gnarled picturesqueness of his groups of trees, the winding unpredictability of his woodland roads. So it’s ironic that his most famous work in the country that most enthusiastically espoused his achievement was this, now in the National Gallery in London where it’s been since 1871.
Ironic, because of all Hobbema’s pictures it has least of the irregular picturesqueness that he is famous for. In fact, it seems to contradict those qualities altogether, in favour of elements that we might today think of as more characteristic of Netherlands scenery: a low, flat horizon and open fields, with a distant village and church tower topped by an onion dome. We are very conscious of a cool, rather austere geometry, the lush intricate foliage of a woodland scene replaced by the stark thin uprights of these regimented and rigorously pruned trees.
The trees hardly add grace or beauty to the scene. They seem merely to emphasise the uncompromising perspective of the straight road that cuts sharply from the spectator’s viewpoint to the distant fields. The discipline, the neatness, the emphasis on careful husbandry, are quintessentially Dutch. The view is rather like that in a Dutch townhouse, with perspectives of open doors and passages leading away into far-off interiors, where the geometry is more explicitly present in walls and ceilings. It’s a domesticated landscape, the product of human organisation and control. And in this, by another irony, it has much in common with the view of landscape offered by Hobbema’s contemporaries in Italy.
The great master of the formal Italian landscape, Nicolas Poussin, once painted a work that gives us a perfect parallel to Hobbema’s scene. It’s a Landscape with Roman Road, now in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, usually dated to about 1648. Poussin’s Roman road, like Hobbema’s, cuts straight into the depths of the space from where we are standing. The geometry is defined not by fields but by architectural structures, large blocks of dressed stone, classical columns and four-square towers. The trees grow more abundantly and rejoice in luxuriant dark-green foliage. It’s no view of modern farmland, rather a dream of the ancient world bathed in a philosophical light. The figures are certainly not farmhands: they recline semi-naked, deep in abstract debate.
There’s no reason to suppose these two pictures have anything more to do with one another than the fact that they are both landscape paintings from the middle decades of the seventeenth century. That century was the epoch when landscape painting came of age in two very different cultures, and the parallels between them, as well as their differences, tell us a lot about the contrasting civilisations that flourished in Europe north and south of the Alps at that time.
Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.