The Great Forest

By the 1650s the province of Holland had very little woodland left. Its towns and shipyards ran on timber floated down the Rhine from Germany or shipped in from Scandinavia, and a stand of old oaks like this one was something a Dutch painter had to go looking for. Jacob van Ruisdael painted it around 1655 to 1660, on a canvas almost two metres wide.

The oaks climb to a crest in the middle, and a sandy road, rutted by cart wheels, runs past a dark pool into the trees. The walkers are tiny, three of them, and the museum in Vienna reads their smallness as deliberate, a way of making the wood feel vast. At the left edge a dead, broken stump stands pale against the shadow. The picture was bought for the imperial collection in 1806.