Italian Landscape

In 1816 King William I founded a Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague. Its core was the old stadholders' collection, which French troops had taken to Paris in 1795 and which had come home the year before. In that first year the new gallery also bought this canvas, from a baroness living in Warmond, a village near Leiden.

Jan Both had painted it in Utrecht around 1645, a few years after returning from Italy. The sun sits low behind the trees. A figure in a white shirt leads a laden mule along a mountain track, a rider on a pale mount follows, and a man in a red cloak has stepped aside by the rocks. According to the museum, these travellers have stopped to relieve themselves. Between the trunks lies the calm water of a lake, with a round tower on its shore.