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It is startlingly beautiful, and so characteristic that after seeing one or two of Hobbema's pictures we are likely to know his work again wherever we may find it. Hobbema got at the soul of a landscape. It was as if one painted a face that was dear to one, and not only made it a good likeness but also painted the person as one felt him to be all the tenderness, or maybe all the sternness.
Whoever desires a faithful and minute picture of this singular region, which reminded me of many scenes in Holland and many of Hobbema's paintings, should read The Goddess of Noon. It contains a number of descriptions whose truth and vividness are matchless.
But he is said by judges to have less invention and less poetic sensibility than his contemporary and friend Ruysdael. Hobbema's subjects are usually villages surrounded by trees like those in Guelderland, water-mills, a slightly broken country, with groups of trees, wheatfields, meadows, and small pools, more rarely portions of towns, and still more seldom old castles and stately mansions.
It may be that Hobbema's failure to get money and honours, or at the very least, kind recognition as a great artist, while he lived, influenced his painting, and made him see mostly the sad side of beauty, nor it is certain that his landscapes give one a strange feeling of sadness and desolation, even when he paints a scene of plenty and fulness.
If Bocklin's pictures seem to be composed of vertical lines, Hobbema's are as startling in their positive vertical and horizontal lines combined. We are not likely to find elevations or gentle, gradual depressions in his landscapes, but straight horizons, long trunked, straight limbed trees; and the landscape seems to be punctured here and there by an upright house or a spire.
The great morose dreamer, contemplative and grave as Wordsworth, must have made more direct and intimate appeal to Corot's soul than the charm and the gaiety of Hobbema's water-mills. Be this as it may, it was Holland that revived the long-forgotten science of values in the Barbizon painters.
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