The Watercourse near ’s-Graveland

The canal running through this picture is man-made. In 1625 a group of Amsterdam merchants obtained permission to develop the sandy heath east of the city, and in 1633 an old drainage ditch was widened into this waterway, the 's-Gravelandse Vaart. Barges carried the local sand to Amsterdam for its new ring of canals and came back loaded with manure and city refuse to fertilise the poor soil. By 1818, when van Os painted it, the digging was long over, and the land had turned into farms and the summer estates of wealthy Amsterdammers. He looked down on it from high up, from a window either in his patron's house or in the village inn. Across the water a shepherd grazes his flock along the bank, and in the garden below a gardener stands among the young trees while two dogs play on the path.