The Cornfield

Around 1660 Jacob van Ruisdael painted roughly two dozen fields of ripening grain, and this is one of them. The shape repeats from picture to picture: a sandy track climbs between the corn toward a cluster of low trees and a cottage, while tall clouds build overhead and take up more than half the canvas. He made it at the height of the Dutch Republic's prosperity, when Amsterdam, where Ruisdael had recently settled, was the grain market of Europe and much of the country's bread arrived by ship from the Baltic. The small travellers and dogs on the road were the kind of detail he often left to a younger colleague, the figure painter Adriaen van de Velde. The picture has hung in Basel since 1914.