Landscape

Between 1814 and 1818 this canvas was hanging in the ushers' room at the royal palace of Aranjuez, south of Madrid, the anteroom where the servants on duty waited. That is the kind of place a large landscape was for. Two men in hats have stopped on the sand path in the foreground, one of them in a red cloak. Behind them a woman carries a load on her head down to a boat, and across the water a pale classical building stands among trees on the rock, with a line of arches running back into the haze. When the royal museum catalogued the picture in 1857 it was entered under Murillo's own name. The Prado now files it as the work of a pupil. A white 273 painted in the lower right corner is one of the old inventory marks it still carries, and it is what tells this landscape from the closely similar one beside it in the collection.