MEINDERT HOBBEMA, 1638‐1709
830 The Avenue, Middelharnis

Neil MacLaren, revised and expanded by Christopher Brown, 1991

Extracted from:
Neil MacLaren; revised and expanded by Christopher Brown, The Dutch School 1600–1900 (London: National Gallery Publications Limited, 1991).

Plate 158

In the distance the village and church of Middelharnis are seen to the left of the avenue; to the right of it are ships’ masts and a beacon.

Signed at the bottom, towards the right (on the reflection of the bank in the ditch); M; hobbema/f 1689.

Oil on canvas, 103.5 × 141 cm (40¾ × 55½).

The sky is considerably worn. The best preserved area is to the right of the nearest right‐hand tree.

Cleaned in 1951 at which time the sky was found to be extensively damaged and repainted. Old varnish and some discoloured retouchings were removed and the sky was extensively restored. In 1972 scientific analysis revealed that synthetic ultramarine and chrome yellow from an early nineteenth‐century restoration were still present in the sky and the painting was cleaned again but not all of the 1951 restoration was removed. This gave the painting an unsatisfactory appearance and therefore in 1980–1 the 1951 restoration was entirely removed and the damages in the sky retouched.

X‐radiographs (Fig. 41) made in 1980 revealed that Hobbema had originally placed another tree on either side of the avenue in the foreground and subsequently painted them out. A reasonable hypothesis to account for the poor state of preservation of the [page 1.177]sky (the landscape and trees are very well preserved) is that by the early nineteenth century the two painted‐out foreground trees had begun to show through the paint of the sky and that a restorer at that time attempted to remove the sky in order to reveal the trees fully. This would account for the very severe wearing which begins at the line of the horizon and is worst on either side of the avenue.

Cross‐sections revealed that the ground was of an unusually intense orange‐brown colour. Optical microscopy and laser microspectrography analysis identified the ground as ferric oxide, so that it is probably one of the yellow‐brown hydrated oxides, which differ in hue considerably depending on the geological source. Yellow ochre is one form. Medium analysis by gas chromatography showed the medium to be linseed oil, like that of the paint layers, but with a much lower proportion of medium to pigment. Some ochre pigments have a high oil absorption (about twice that of lead white) and it could be that initially too little oil was used to bind the pigment particles of the ground firmly to each other and to the paint layers above. This may explain why the orange‐brown ground was found to be slightly more vulnerable to cleaning solvents than the paint layers above. It also may explain the reluctance of past restorers to remove previous retouchings completely.

The blue pigment in the sky is smalt which has become darker and more transparent with time, the orange‐brown ground beneath reducing the blue colour to some extent. The green paint is in every case not based on the use of a green pigment but mixtures of blue and yellow, azurite and yellow lake. There has probably been some fading of the yellow, resulting in a lighter and bluer shade of green than originally intended.

Discussion

The village of Middelharnis lies on the north coast of the island of Over Flakee (Province of South Holland) in the mouth of the Maas. It is here seen from the south‐east, from a point on the Boomgaardweg (now the Steene Weg). The view has changed little and Hobbema’s painting is remarkably accurate.¹ The church (St Michael’s) was built in the second half of the fifteenth century. It still stands but the brick balustrade on the tower was replaced by another, in stone, in 1778 and the spire with the bulbous top was removed by the French in 1811 to make room for a semaphore (Middelharnis being on the semaphore route from The Hague to Paris); the brickwork of the tower has since been partly covered with stone.² Just visible beyond the east end of the church is the tower of the town hall built in 1639. The barn (which, with its high roof, may be a madder kiln) in the middle distance survived until about 1879.³

In the belief that Hobbema gave up painting soon after 1668 (cf. the biographical notice above), Hofstede de Groot⁴ supposed the third figure of the date to be a mutilated 6; he also thought it improbable that such a picture could have been produced as late as 1689 when Dutch painting was in its decadence. Although the top of the third figure is smudged, there is, pace Hofstede de Groot, no doubt whatsoever that it is an 8; this has been made even clearer by recent cleaning and confirmed by infra‐red photography.⁵ Nor is there any reason for supposing that the signature and date are not authentic; they conform to Hobbema’s usual calligraphy and resisted the action of the solvents used when the picture was cleaned. The placing of the signature on the reflection in the water cannot be considered suspicious since it is paralleled in other [page 1.178]works by Hobbema (and also in some of Ruisdael’s paintings). In any case the date of the picture has been put beyond doubt by external evidence. Ulbo Mijs⁶ proved by means of contemporary documents in the Middelharnis archives that the beacon visible in the picture in the distance towards the right was not erected until 1682 (on the East Dyke). He also found less conclusive additional evidence in support of the later date in the avenue of trees along the Boomgaardweg, which was not planted until 1664, and in the trees in the south and south‐east part of the churchyard (noticeably shorter than those on the north) planted in place of others cut down in 1666; he suggested reasonably that neither could have been as tall as those in the picture by 1669.

There is no documentary evidence that Hobbema travelled in South Holland in the 1680s and he may have painted the picture from drawings made earlier. It should be noted, nevertheless, that there is a view of Deventer⁷ (in the Province of Gelderland) the date on which has been read as 1689 and he may have been travelling around the Netherlands at this period. The fact that The Avenue came from a collection in Sommelsdijk, the neighbouring village to Middelharnis (see provenance), suggests that it may have been commissioned by a local patron.

Rosenberg⁸ suggested that Jacob van Ruisdael’s Grainfield in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, was the formal source for Hobbema’s composition, while Stechow⁹ also mentioned a Flemish painting in the Rijksmuseum¹⁰ and a picture by Cuyp in the Wallace Collection¹¹ in this context. However, when an image is so clearly topographically accurate to a considerable degree, it hardly seems necessary to undertake an exhaustive search for its compositional prototypes in the works of earlier landscape painters.

COPY: A reduced copy by Adrianus van der Koogh (1796–1831), made in 1822,¹² is in the council‐chamber of the town hall in Middelharnis (cf. provenance).

PROVENANCE: The picture was in the collection of Theodorus Kruislander (d. 1782), clerk of the Council of Sommelsdijk, near Middelhamis, and is said to have been bought from Kruislander’s estate in 1783 by the Middelharnis council for the town hall¹³ but HdG has very acceptably suggested that it was bought for them at the sale of Kruislander’s possessions (in Sommelsdijk?), 15–22 October 1782 (lot 31) for 25 guilders 10 stuivers by L. Kolff (a Lambertus Kolff was the head of Middelharnis council in 1782¹⁴). It remained in Middelharnis town hall until 1822 when it was exchanged for a view of the village of Renkum and a copy of The Avenue, both by Adrianus van der Koogh of Dordrecht. It was purchased from Adrianus van der Koogh by the art dealer Arnoldus Lamme for 800 guilders.¹⁵ He sold the painting to Heer Rom Pot for 2,500 guilders. Later Pot’s entire collection was purchased (in 1824?) by Charles Galli and taken to Edinburgh, 1826 (No. 23);¹⁶ James Stuart of Dunean sale, Edinburgh, 9–11 February 1829 (lot 120),¹⁷ 195 gns. It was afterwards brought to London and cleaned, and was sold by Ewing for £800.¹⁸ It was in the collection of Sir Robert Peel, Bart., by 1834,¹⁹ and exhibited at the BI , 1835. Purchased with the Peel collection, 1871.

EXHIBITIONS: BI 1835 , No. 19; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; Philadelphia, Museum of Art, ‘Masters of 17th‐Century Dutch Landscape Painting’, 1987–8 , cat. no. 47.

REFERENCES:

General: Smith No. 88; HdG No. 13.

In text: