Peasants returning Home

While a mother and her child sit resting by the side of the road, a little group of peasants with two covered wagons passes by. The landscape is bathed in warm sunlight and the atmosphere is one of great tranquility.
Pieter de Molijn was not concerned with painting a specific landscape, but with creating a mood: the sun shines, there are clouds – but not threatening ones – in the sky; in short it is a peaceful day. The artist has used several tried and tested tricks of the trade. The path is bathed in sunlight, for example, while the foreground and background are in shade, thus creating depth. He also used a composition of diagonals: the two paths that cross in the painting lead the eye into the distance.
Pieter de Molijn, born in London of Flemish parents, lived and worked in Haarlem, the cradle of the typical Dutch landscape in painting.
He played a not insignificant part in the development of landscape as a genre. Around 1626 he became one of the first people to stress the creation of mood. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, when he painted this work, this was still the fashion in landscape painting.