Mountainous Landscape in Italy

This landscape is painted on a sheet of copper about the size of a page of writing paper, 29 centimetres wide. Copper gave a painter a hard, perfectly smooth surface with no weave of canvas or grain of wood, so the smallest touches stay crisp. Willem de Heusch used it for an Italian mountain road, with a pack mule resting on a sunlit track under tall trees, rocks and a small waterfall to the left, and a town on a far hilltop.

It has a companion of exactly the same size, also on copper, and the two have been together since at least 1738. De Heusch signed this one twice, on the front and again on the back of the plate. The painting belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in the museum's second building, the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague.