The Travelers

Two horsemen ride along a rutted country road toward the viewer, small against the sweep of the Dutch countryside: to the left a watermill beside its river, its great wheel turning under a thatched and tiled roof, to the right a screen of tall trees, and above all a sky of white and dove-gray clouds rolling over pale blue. Meindert Hobbema painted this, one of his largest works, about 1662, closely following a smaller watermill composition by his teacher Jacob van Ruisdael. A charcoal-gray bridge leads over to the mill, ducks float in the grass-lined water, dogs trot ahead of the horses, and in the shade of the trees a man with a sack on his back rests on the bank — the small human touches that make Hobbema’s rural scenes feel lived-in rather than posed. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.