Dorfstraße unter Bäumen

The museum’s German title means “village street under trees”; its record dates the picture about 1663, five years before Hobbema took the post of wine gauger in Amsterdam in 1668. The office gave him a steady income, and though his output fell after he took it up his powers did not. Hobbema trained with Jacob van Ruisdael and shared his teacher’s taste for luxuriantly green broadleaf trees, though he left his foliage fanned open where Ruisdael massed it into dense woodland, and he avoided the violence of the elements that is always present in Ruisdael’s landscapes. The museum singles out his late Avenue of Middelharnis of 1689, in the National Gallery in London, as the picture without which the last phase of Dutch landscape painting would read as a faint affair. Catalogued in Berlin as inventory 1984, the painting was acquired in 1926 in an exchange with the Zurich art dealer Zollinger. It is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.