Neglected by his own countrymen, his best works found their way into English private collections, from which they are beginning to emerge into the hands of American collectors: witness The Water Mill, known as the “Trevor Landscape,” and the Wooded Landscape, or “Holford Landscape,” now owned by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, and the Wooded Road, in the possession of Mrs. William L. Elkins. Meanwhile Hobbema’s masterpiece is The Avenue of Middelharnis, in the National Gallery, while the Louvre also owns a fine example in The Water Mill, and the popularity and reputation which these works have so worthily obtained has led to an overestimation of this artist’s rank. He has even been classed with Van Ruisdael. On the evidence of The Avenue this is intelligible, but unfortunately this picture is a unique example. The other pictures mentioned above are also examples to stir enthusiasm, but they, too, are exceptional. You will not find their equals anywhere in the galleries of Europe. On the contrary, those which you do find are dryly objective reiterations of oak-trees, water, mills, and houses, perfunctorily seen and rendered. They inspire little enthusiasm and weary by repetition.
The Avenue, on the contrary, is an extraordinary instance of a moment’s heightened vision of the facts, boldly grasped and carried through unerringly to a grand conclusion. Again, in the other pictures named, especially in Mr. Morgan’s The Water Mill, there is evidence of something more than talent. A consummate knowledge of forms, skill of compositional construction, and ability to create an ensemble of tonality are here reinforced by a comprehension of the feeling of the scene, that has lifted it out of mere representation and enhanced its significance. But unfortunately the talent, transfigured in these examples, is, in the general run of this artist’s pictures, squandered; used without conscience and permitted to drift into heartless mannerism.
The fact is that, judged by the final test of the quality of the painter’s mental and artistic attitude toward his subject, the majority of Hobbema’s pictures rank considerably below par. It is such work as the generality of his, which makes the student of Dutch art sometimes pause in his wanderings through the galleries and ask himself whether there is not a great deal of perfunctoriness and tedious iteration among these old masters of Holland. There is, and the fact may as well be grasped first as last. It is a school of great craftsmen, who sometimes worked indifferently, punctuated with a considerable number who rise conspicuously above their fellows, but among these exceptions, save on rare occasions, Hobbema is not to be reckoned.
VIEW OF HAARLEM JACOB VAN RUISDAEL
FROM HILL OF OVERVEEN
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM