A Peasant driving a laden mule

This painting is a typical example of Jan Both's compositional inventions built upon a series of diagonals. Here the path, the stream and the ascendant versant of the hill structure the whole picture and give a sense of depth even though a large stripe of land occupies the foreground. Jan Both also often represented landscapes with transiting laden mules and figures such as Italian landscape,Mauritshuis, The Hague, bathed in a warm Mediterranean sunlight, a tonality that is recurrent in his entire production. The reddish brown palette of the present picture, which probably looks darker than it would have originally been, is close to a ca. 1645 painting in the National Gallery, London: Men with an Ox and Cattle by a Pool,which also presents a similar subject. However the date of his works is far from easy to determine and he rarely dated them.