Wooded Landscape with Gipsy Women

Abraham Govaerts signed and dated this panel in 1612, and it has travelled a good deal since. By 1681 it belonged to Albertine Agnes, a princess of the House of Orange. It later hung at Oranienstein, a family palace in Germany, and passed by inheritance to Prince William V in The Hague. In 1795 French armies occupied the Dutch Republic, the prince's pictures were confiscated, and this one was taken to Paris, to the Louvre. It came back in 1815. The scene is a sandy path through an oak wood, where hunters and a fortune-teller have stopped in the sunshine. A fallen tree lies dark across the foreground, and past it the light opens towards a few houses. In 1816 the panel went on show in William V's own picture gallery in The Hague, and after a long spell in the Mauritshuis it hangs there once more.