Italian Landscape with a Draughtsman

In the shade at the front, a man sits on the rocks with a sheet of paper, drawing the view, while his companions rest beside him. It looks like a record of sketching outdoors in Italy. The Rijksmuseum points out that Jan Both painted it at home in Utrecht, around 1650 to 1652, a decade after he had come back from Rome. The Italy here is assembled: a wooden bridge over a falling stream, mule drivers leading their animals across, a road dividing wooded hills from open country, and a low evening sun turning the distance gold. At almost two and a half metres wide it is his largest painting. The Amsterdam banker and collector Adriaan van der Hoop bought it in London in 1834, and when he died in 1854 he left it to the city together with 223 other paintings.