![cover image](https://wikiwandv2-19431.kxcdn.com/_next/image?url=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Meindert_Hobbema_001.jpg/640px-Meindert_Hobbema_001.jpg&w=640&q=50)
The Avenue at Middelharnis
1689 Dutch Golden Age painting by Meindert Hobbema / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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 Meuse (Dutch: Maas) delta in South Holland, the Netherlands.
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Meindert_Hobbema_001.jpg/640px-Meindert_Hobbema_001.jpg)
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Forest_landscape_with_a_merry_company_in_a_cart%2C_by_Meindert_Hobbema.jpg/640px-Forest_landscape_with_a_merry_company_in_a_cart%2C_by_Meindert_Hobbema.jpg)
The painting has long been one of the best-known Dutch landscape paintings,[1] and certainly Hobbema's best-known work,[2] at least in the English-speaking world: "it is as if the artist had produced only a single picture" according to Christopher Lloyd.[3] 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".[4] According to Michael Levey, "it occupies a position in painting somewhat equivalent to that in poetry of Gray's Elegy,[5] and for Seymour Slive "it is the swan song of Holland's great period of landscape painting which fully deserves its high reputation."[6] For Gerald Reitlinger, it "soars above the other nine National Gallery Hobbemas".[7]
The untypically symmetrical and frontal composition of the painting appears to record very accurately the view Hobbema saw;[8] the alder trees along the road were planted in 1664.[9] It is signed and dated in the reflection on the ditch at right: "M:hobbema/f 1689", [10] over twenty years after Hobbema largely gave up painting,[11] and right at the end of the Dutch Golden Age landscape period.[12]