Hobbema and Heidegger: On Truth and Beauty

This book shows how the beautiful landscape paintings of Meindert Hobbema, a seventeenth-century painter of the Dutch Golden Age, are in accord with the thought of Martin Heidegger, a twentieth-century philosopher, on beauty and truth. Since little is known about Hobbema’s life, this work concentrates on ideas that are central to Heidegger’s philosophy of art and beauty and the way these ideas are attuned to Hobbema’s landscapes. Heidegger holds that the beauty of a great work of art calls out from that work and is firmly linked to the disclosure of hidden truths concerning essences of beings. This book illustrates in detail that beauty and such truths indeed call out from Hobbema’s paintings.