pools; and streams feeding humble mills. Witness
the one in the Louvre for which he showed so great a predilection and
which he reproduced under so many varied aspects.

But whatever may be the subject he treats, he always remains the happy
interpreter of the calm scenery of his own country of low and drowned
horizons; the painter attracted by the light which with him envelops
everything it approaches--trees, cottages, ground, waters, and
distances bathed in delicious depths.

Nature, gentle and friendly to man, which he saw with a simplicity and a
clearness approached by no other painter, attracted and charmed him
above all else, in contrast to his contemporary and friend, J. Ruysdael,
who, led away by heart-breaking melancholy, would never see any side of
her but the energetic and lugubrious, the sad and troubled.

In his forests, on the banks of his ponds and rivers, in the
neighbourhood of his huts and mills, Hobbema wants to have company; so
he has sown his landscapes with figures, and they are constantly
animated with people and animals. Are these figures always his own? It
would be imprudent to affirm this, although they harmonize in most cases
so marvellously with the rest of the picture, and it would therefore
seem difficult for them to be by another hand. However, if we must defer
to his historian, von Wurzbach, they are very frequently the work of
Nicholaas Berghem, Adriaen Van de Velde, Lingelbach, Philip Wouwerman,
Isack van Ostade, Pijnacker, etc., which would prove, at least, that he
knew how to select his collaborators.

The painter of the _Avenue of Middelharnais_ in the National Gallery, of
the _Mill_ in our Louvre, and of many other masterpieces was yet
unknown, or rather despised, not very long ago, and it is quite recently
that his name has emerged from the unjust neglect in which it was
buried. This great name of Hobbema had fallen into such discredit that
when one of his pictures fell by chance into the hands of an amateur or
merchant the signature would be effaced as quickly as possible and
replaced by that of J. Ruysdael, the sole painter worthy of entering
into competition with him.

Who then is this Meindert Hobbema? Where was he born? Where did he live?
What was his life? Alas, we know very little concerning this impeccable
master, one of the greatest glories of Dutch painting. The principal
historians of the Netherland school are ignorant of him or pass him by
in silence. Houbraken, De