Hobbema by Timothy L. Marsh (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) It was posterity’s loss that he married the maid of a burgomaster and had the sense to take advantage of a good connection. He painted water mills, twisted foliage, broad-leaf forests, but tranquil Dutch terrains don’t put food on the table ‘til you’ve been dead a few centuries, and frankly, his family couldn’t wait that long. At thirty he gave up painting for a position collecting Amsterdam’s wine tax and spent the last forty years of his life inspecting casks instead of those tawny autumn glows and stacks of summer cumulus. Forty years. It was his duty as provider to shelve his calling. Forty years the quiet campestral scenes screamed at his instincts, kicked at his ribs. The shadows on the knolls. The huts among the trees. The dangle of cow udders. How many ripples of pond ducks never made it to canvas, no wisdom can guess. Forty years. It’s hard to resent a man for doing what he has to, but that doesn't stop people like me during famines like this. If all the world’s geniuses could feel the pang of what they don’t create as it turns in the gut of the terminally mundane, it’d be far less than a rare occurrence, squandered talent.
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