Italian Landscape: The Large Tree

Dutch artist Jan Both spent several years in Italy, where he collaborated with leading landscape painters such as Claude Lorrain. The Ponce painting shows a landscape of the countryside bathed in the last rays of sun at dusk. Two groups of wayfarers and their donkeys loaded with goods, walking down a meandering country road. They are dwarfed by a large tree, probably an oak, which stands on the road’s embankment in the middle of the painting. The artist made a preparatory drawing (without the figures; now in the British Museum, London) and an etching, titled “The Large Tree” and based on the same composition.