The Avenue at Middelharnis

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 Maas 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.

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