Lot Essay
This is a billiant example of Moucheron's mature landscape style and shows clearly the influence of his teacher in Amsterdam, Jan Asselijn. As a young man, in the mid 1650s, Moucheron travelled to France and possibly to Italy where at some point he must also have encountered the work of Jan Both - the pre-eminent southern landscape painter of the day. In this work, the pictorial scheme in which travellers approach the viewer on a track against a distant, warmly-lit, southern landscape framed by trees, instantly brings to mind the large-scale landscapes of Both.