Forest road next to a fordable pond with travelers

Around 1607 Jan Brueghel was working through a kind of picture he had taken up two years earlier, the inside of a wood seen from the road. The path is well worn, a shallow stream crosses it, and a village shows on the horizon. Riders ford the stream to the left. A cart with three horses heads into the thicket, and a family of peasants walks after it. In 1746 the panel hung in the Queen of Spain's antechamber at the palace of La Granja, and the clerk inventorying Elisabeth Farnese's pictures described this one by counting: figures on foot and on horseback, three carts among them, two drawn by three horses and the middle one by a single horse. At Aranjuez in 1794 another clerk counted the same three carts. The number that first inventory gave it, 180, is still painted in white in the lower left corner, and the small fleur-de-lis in the opposite corner is her collection mark.