A Shepherd and a Rider on a Country Lane  1823

In the 1820s, the countryside of France began to rival Italy for the attention of its painters, who drew from a tradition with strong roots in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish art. This scene may be an early depiction of the Forest of Fontainebleau. While the landscape retains all the freshness of a plein-air study, the figures are stock characters fro...