352 MEINDERT HOBBEMA SECT. whole effect. Many landscapes have in course of time become un- pleasantly dark and brown. Where this is not the case, Hobbema's pictures at once arrest attention by their freshness and their pleasant dis- position of light and shade. The best of them are rich in attractive details, with gracefully handled trees, carefully executed foregrounds, varied vistas of cornfields, skilfully constructed houses, water-mills and castle ruins, groups of men and animals well introduced into the composition, and so forth. Only in a few pictures is the composition made restless by an ex- cessive amount of detail or by the undue prominence of the figures. Although Hobbema's works, for their greater rarity, fetch much higher prices than those of Ruisdael, the question as to which of the two was the greater artist need scarcely be raised again in our time. The five or six best pictures by each painter may perhaps be evenly balanced. In the faithful observation of nature and in the rendering of atmosphere and sunlight the two men are on an equality. Yet Ruisdael has far more versatility and more feeling qualities which weigh down the scale in his favour since Hobbema has no counterbalancing qualities which Ruisdael lacked. 1 PUPILS AND IMITATORS OF MEINDERT HOBBEMA It would seem that Hobbema had no pupils, in the ordinary sense of the word ; at all events, their names have not come down to us. The century was too far advanced, and the artistic decline was too strongly marked. In the years 1665-70 the time was past for any further develop- ment of landscape-painting in the national sense. The painters, whose works are wrongly attributed to Hobbema, are counted among the pupils of Ruisdael. Jan Looten, Cornelis Decker, and Gerrit van Hees are the most prominent of them. A few years ago there was tried in Munich an action concerning a supposed Hobbema which was in fact painted by Ludolf de Jongh, who is noticed among the imitators of Cuyp (see Vol. II. p. 5). In the eighteenth century EGBERT VAN DRIELST (1746-1818) acquired a certain reputation by his imitations of Hobbema. He painted subjects such as Hobbema chose, but his work has only an external and superficial resemblance to that of the master. Next to Rembrandt, no Dutch painter has had more forgeries attributed to him than Hobbema, especially at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when his pictures all at once began to be sought after. Several landscape-painters of that period, such as Van der Koogh, Regemorter, a certain Murkes, and the Bremen painters named Menken, are regarded as deliberate imitators of Hobbema. As they, naturally enough, never signed their productions with their own names, it is impossible to ascribe to any one of them a special class of forged Hobbemas, and it is particularly difficult to divide the great mass of these things into individual groups. 1 Dr. W. von Bode has discussed this question in a conclusive manner in his Great Masters of Dutch and Flemish Painting.
