But whatever may be the subject he treats, he always remains the happy interpreter of the calm scenery of his own country of low and drowned horizons; the painter attracted by the light which with him envelops everything it approaches—­trees, cottages, ground, waters, and distances bathed in delicious depths.

Nature, gentle and friendly to man, which he saw with a simplicity and a clearness approached by no other painter, attracted and charmed him above all else, in contrast to his contemporary and friend, J. Ruysdael, who, led away by heart-breaking melancholy, would never see any side of her but the energetic and lugubrious, the sad and troubled.

In his forests, on the banks of his ponds and rivers, in the neighbourhood of his huts and mills, Hobbema wants to have company; so he has sown his landscapes with figures, and they are constantly animated with people and animals.  Are these figures always his own?  It would be imprudent to affirm this, although they harmonize in most cases so marvellously with the rest of the picture, and it would therefore seem difficult for them to be by another hand.  However, if we must defer to his historian, von Wurzbach, they are very frequently the work of Nicholaas Berghem, Adriaen Van de Velde, Lingelbach, Philip Wouwerman, Isack van Ostade, Pijnacker, etc., which would prove, at least, that he knew how to select his collaborators.

The painter of the Avenue of Middelharnais in the National Gallery, of the Mill in our Louvre, and of many other masterpieces was yet unknown, or rather despised, not very long ago, and it is quite recently that his name has emerged from the unjust neglect in which it was buried.  This great name of Hobbema had fallen into such discredit that when one of his pictures fell by chance into the hands of an amateur or merchant the signature would be effaced as quickly as possible and replaced by that of J. Ruysdael, the sole painter worthy of entering into competition with him.

Who then is this Meindert Hobbema?  Where was he born?  Where did he live?  What was his life?  Alas, we know very little concerning this impeccable master, one of the greatest glories of Dutch painting.  The principal historians of the Netherland school are ignorant of him or pass him by in silence.  Houbraken, Descamps, and d’Argenville are dumb regarding him.  Those who, by chance, treat of him, commit so many errors that it is best to take no account of their words.  Three cities, Amsterdam, Koeverden, and a village, Middelharnais, in the province of Guelder, which he has made famous by the marvellous picture, the subject of our notice, dispute the honour of being his birthplace.  But, it seems, although nothing can be affirmed with certainty, that he first saw the light in Amsterdam in 1638.  He was the son of a sergeant in the Netherland army and spent his early life in Koeverden, where he was baptized and where his father was in garrison.