Landscape with a Ford

The last of the afternoon light falls slantwise across a wooded hillside while travellers urge a laden animal through a shallow ford below, the water turning pale under a luminous sky; behind them the hills recede into a hazy blue distance. Jan Both (died 1652) left his native Utrecht for Rome in the 1630s, travelled there with his brother Andries, and came home carrying the light of the Roman campagna, which he painted for the rest of his short life. The Italianate landscape the two brothers established became one of the most imitated modes in Dutch painting, and the veiled warmth of a Both sunset, with everything else soft in the fall of its light, was his particular signature. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.