Meindert Lubbertszoon Hobbema (bapt. 31 October 1638 – 7 December 1709) was a Dutch Golden Age painter of landscapes, specializing in views of woodland, although his most famous painting, The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689, National Gallery, London), shows a different type of scene. Hobbema was a pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and in his mature period produced paintings developing one aspect of his master's more varied output, specializing in "sunny forest scenes opened by roads and glistening ponds, fairly flat landscapes with scattered tree groups, and water mills", including over 30 of the last in paintings. The majority of his mature works come from the 1660s; after he married and took a job as an exciseman in 1668 he painted less, and after 1689 apparently not at all. He was not very well known in his lifetime or for nearly a century after his death, but became steadily more popular from the last decades of the 18th century until the 20th century. Life Hobbema was born and died in Amsterdam. The son of a carpenter named Lubbert Meyndertsz, he adopted his grandmother´s surname Hobbema quite early on, although it is not known why. He spent a period in an orphanage from 1653, but by about two years later he had left, and soon became the only documented pupil of the leading Amsterdam landscapist, Jacob van Ruisdael, whose influence was to dominate his work. Jan van Kessel may also have been a pupil of Ruisdael; he was close to Hobbema, who was godfather to his child in 1675. Hobbema's signed pictures come from 1658 to 1689. For a considerable period it was profitable to pass off Hobbemas as Ruisdaels, and Hobbema's name was probably removed from several of his works. Hobbema seems to have painted the figures on a number of Ruisdael's paintings; they were recognised as a weakness of the master. They may have travelled together a short way across the German border in 1661, via the Veluwe, Deventer and Ootmarsum. Hobbema married at the age of thirty, to Eeltje Vinck from Gorcum, a maidservant to the burgomaster Lambert Reynst, at this point an important political figure in the "republican" Dutch States Party as brother-in-law to the De Graeff brothers (but soon to lose office and influence in the Rampjaar of 1672). She was four years older than him. The wedding