Meindert Hobbema

Meindert Hobbema learned landscape from the finest Dutch master of it, Jacob van Ruisdael, in whose Amsterdam workshop he trained in the 1650s. For a while he painted watermills and wooded roads in his teacher's manner, then he mostly stopped. In 1668 he took a steady municipal job gauging the casks of imported wine for the Amsterdam customs, and painting became a sideline.

Yet late in that thinning career he made one of the most reproduced landscapes in the world. The Avenue at Middelharnis, dated 1689, shows a dead-straight muddy lane running to a distant village between two rows of spindly, top-heavy trees, the whole thing a lesson in how a road can pull the eye into deep space.

It hangs in London's National Gallery and turns up in every textbook chapter on perspective. Hobbema kept his customs post for decades and died poor in 1709, his reputation as a landscape painter barely noticed in his own lifetime.