Path in a Forest

In 1794 a clerk worked through the Palacio Real in Madrid, room by room, listing what hung there. In one of the small chambers he came to this panel and set it down as a landscape with a ploughman at work, worth 2,500 reales. The description became the title. By 1834, when the royal pictures passed to the museum, the work was entered as País del arado, the plough landscape, and the catalogue of 1857 spells out what a viewer was expected to find in it: a wheeled plough, wagons, men on horseback, a river, a few trees, and cattle in the distance. The Prado now calls it a path in a forest and dates it no more closely than somewhere between 1600 and 1625. Between those two royal inventories its valuation had risen from 2,500 reales to 7,120.