Pastorale. Danseurs dans un paysage

As so many Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, Jan Both travelled to Rome to complete his training, and brought back its landscapes, its antique ruins and above all its light. In Rome he met Claude Gellée, called le Lorrain, whose compositions left a lasting mark on his work, and he returned to Utrecht laden with drawings. This mountainous landscape — titled Pastorale or sometimes Danseurs dans un paysage — depicts an intensely Italianate nature: a warm sun sets over the fields, the peasants and their wives have stopped their labour, and not far off a town appears, perhaps a ruin. Both’s strength was to combine “Italianism” with the Dutch landscape tradition, and he stood as the leader of the second generation of Dutch Italianate painters; the golden sky breaking through the vegetation, opening in atmospheric perspective onto the mountains, recurs in the Paysage de montagne (Madrid, Prado) and Paysage italien (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland). The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.