This small jewel-of-a-painting showing a peaceful landscape of dunes, meandering paths, and trees provides a contrast to other Dutch landscapes in the MFA collection. The very Dutchness of the scene is a foil to the Italianate character of contemporary works by Adam Pynacker and Willem de Heusch, and the clear, relatively colorful tonality, very different from the subdued earth tones of earlier depictions, explains why such paintings were eagerly bought by eighteenth-century English collectors and appreciated by Boucher, Gainsborough and John Crome.

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