Extensive Italianate landscape with a traveler and drovers on a road, a farmhouse and a village beyond

Celebrated for his Italianate landscapes drenched in golden sunlight, Jan Both was an influential painter among the second generation of Dutch exponents of the genre. Jan and his older brother Andreas, with whom he often collaborated, studied at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. They are documented as living on via Vittoria (a popular street for foreign artists) between 1630 and 1641. While in Italy, Jan was closely associated with the community of Northern painters known as the Bentvueghels, or ‘birds of a feather’. He also befriended the French painter, Claude Lorrain, with whom Both collaborated in Rome on a major project for the Spanish king Philip IV; a series of large landscapes to decorate his hunting lodge at the Buen Retiro in Madrid. While in Rome, Both specialized in genre subjects but on his return to his native Utrecht in 1642, he turned to the idealized landscapes for which he is best known. The present painting features among other identified works in an interior scene by the Flemish painter Gillis van Tillborch (fig. 1), dated circa 1660, testifying to Both’s popularity in his lifetime and beyond.