A Road near Cottages

The composition of this painting, which moves from trees and plants in dark shades of brown and green on the right to wide, bright expanses of open sky on the left, encourages the eye to move through the landscape. The two figures leading a cow down the path at the centre of the painting echo this right-to-left motion. Their trajectory is underscored by the clouds which sweep dramatically up from the right-hand horizon line towards the top-left corner. The painter’s use of light, such as the shifting patches of sunlight on the ground, contribute to the feeling of a sunny, breezy day in the countryside.  

Jacob van Mosscher (active c.1605-55) was a landscape painter, about whom relatively little is known. He appears to have been active in the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands, and his few surviving signed works reveal a distinctive way of painting trees and shrubbery. He is not to be confused with the painter Jacob van Musscher I (c. 1580-1623) who lived and worked in Haarlem and Delft.