Carrier-wagon on a hollow road

A hollow road, a Hohlweg, is a lane that cart wheels and rain have worn down over centuries far below the surrounding fields, and in 1855 these sunken tracks were still the ordinary roads of rural Switzerland. Koller, then 27 and only beginning to be known, set a covered messenger wagon and its team of horses on the descent through one, the banks rising steeply on either side. He had spent years studying animals up close, and the strain of the horses holding the load back on the slope is what the picture is really about. The country around him was changing fast, the first railways had opened only a few years earlier and the modern federal state was less than a decade old, but on this road nothing has arrived yet except the wagon. It is a large canvas for so plain a scene, about 123 by 102 centimetres, and it belongs today to the Kunstmuseum Basel.