Middle Harness Street / by Meindert Hobbema / 1686 / oil on canvas / 104 x 141 cm / National Museum of London

This masterpiece amazingly shows the dominance of the sky over the flat land of Holland. The sharp shortening of the road and the rapid reduction in the size of tall and tall trees show the vastness of this fertile land. The carefully calculated distance between the trees and the role that their slender trunks and leaves have formed against the sky is the work of an artist who has a great sense of composition and understands the harmony between spaces with great sensitivity. How different is this painting from the type of pictures that are printed in various art books to show the vanishing point and perspective, and it usually includes an iron rail with telephone poles on both sides of it at regular intervals like an arrow towards the horizon! The road, in this painting of Middle Harness Street, turns sharply to the right, allowing us to see the couple in the middle plan, while also creating one of the important horizontal axes, and in this way, it balances the vertical lines of the rows of trees.

Wheat field/ by Jacob van Ruisdael/ 1670/ paint and oil on canvas/ 100 x 130 cm/ Metropolitan Museum of New York

Hobbema uses here the composition that his teacher Ruisdael used for the wheat fields painting. However, the mood of Hobbema's painting is completely different.

The storm clouds of Ruisdael's painting have moved away and the great rhythm of light and dark has disappeared. He narrowed his field of vision and made his landscape brighter, more orderly and more colorful than that of his master. His view of nature is unique: without elegiac allusions and melancholic references to the relationship between man and the universe.

Meindert Hobbema was a Dutch painter in the golden age of nature painting and one of the students of Jacob van Ruisdael.

Prepared and arranged by: Narges Saheb Ekhtiari