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 . It shows a road leading to the village of Middelharnis on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee in the Meuse () delta in South Holland, the Netherlands.
The painting has long been one of the best-known Dutch landscape paintings, and certainly Hobbema's best-known work, at least in the English-speaking world: "it is as if the artist had produced only a single picture" according to Christopher Lloyd. 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". According to Michael Levey, "it occupies a position in painting somewhat equivalent to that in poetry of Gray's Elegy, and for Seymour Slive "it is the swan song of Holland's great period of landscape painting which fully deserves its high reputation." For Gerald Reitlinger, it "soars above the other nine National Gallery Hobbemas".
The untypically symmetrical and frontal composition of the painting appears to record very accurately the view Hobbema saw; the alder trees along the road were planted in 1664. It is signed and dated in the reflection on the ditch at right: "M:hobbema/f 1689", over twenty years after Hobbema largely gave up painting, and right at the end of the Dutch Golden Age landscape period.
Description
The village is seen from the south-east. The road was called the Boomgaardweg, but is now the Steene Weg, or Steneweg. The top of the church tower has been rebuilt, and the spire was removed by the French in 1811 to make a semaphore station, connecting The Hague with Paris. The smaller tower to the right of the church, seen between the trees, is the town hall, built in 1639, and the barn to the right survived until the 1870s.
The village lies on the edge of the island and was a fishing port; ships' masts and a beacon with a tripod support can be seen in the distance to the right of the avenue, on the beach facing the Haringvliet. This was then a salt-water channel, but has been dammed and turned into a fresh-water lake in modern times. The island was detached from the mainland when the Haringvliet formed as a result of two major flooding events. The first was in 1216, which breached the dunes of Voorne and created a deep saltwater inlet. In the St. Elizabeth floods of 1421, this inlet connected to the Merwede and became an important estuary of the Rhine and Meuse rivers.
Context
Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709) was a pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and in his mature period produced paintings developing one aspect of his master's more varied output, showing very different scenes from this painting. Hobbema specialized in "sunny forest scenes opened by roads and glistening ponds, fairly flat landscapes with scattered tree groups, and water mills", including over thirty of the last in paintings.
His paths or roads normally wind diagonally across his composition through dense trees and vegetation, the trees spreading and varying in size. The water mills and other buildings are generally seen in the near distance, rather as the barn is here, and generally only one or two appear in each picture. His compositions are carefully contrived and presumably imaginary, avoiding all symmetry. This painting is a surprising break from most of these somewhat "tired conventions of his earlier work".
In contrast to his usual scenes of rough woodland, in this scene the straight lines, lopped trees, deep drainage ditches on both sides of the road, and regimented young trees in the plot to the right, all emphasize the man-made nature of this landscape. A patch of rough woodland remains in the left foreground, contrasting with the saplings in rows on the right. The man tending to these is unusual in 17th-century Dutch landscapes, which rarely show anyone working the land. What brought Hobbema to this rather out-of-the-way location remains unknown.
In contrast to this accurate depiction of a specific place, it is thought that his compositions were usually assembled and painted in the studio from a number of different elements presumably recorded in drawings, and not all coming from the same place; there are often several versions changing parts of the composition.