L'Allée de Middelharnis

By 1689 the great age of Dutch landscape was largely finished, and so, more or less, was Hobbema. Years earlier he had taken a steady municipal job measuring and taxing imported wine, and he painted only now and then. Late in life he made this, his most famous picture, a plain sandy road running dead straight to the village of Middelharnis on an island in the Meuse delta, lined with impossibly tall, spindly poplars. The road is real and still there, now called the Steneweg, though houses have replaced most of the trees. David Hockney liked to point out that the picture has two vanishing points, one where the road shrinks to nothing in the centre, and another up in the sky, because the trees push your eye so far upward. A hunter with his dog walks toward you down the track.