Landscape with Conversing Peasants

landscape

Peasants returning from the fields have stopped for a moment by an old man sitting by the side of the road. The juxtaposition of young and old, which is a frequent motif in Dutch art, is in this case quite fortuitous. In fact the picture records a brief instant and is so generalized that it lacks all narrative quality.

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About the Artist

Pieter de Molyn

1595 – 1661

Dutch landscape painter, active mainly in Haarlem. With Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael, also active in Haarlem, he ranks as one of the pioneers of naturalistic landscape painting in Holland. It is not known if these three painters worked together, if they arrived at similar solutions independently, or if one of them began experiments with monochromatic pictures of dunes and cottages and the others followed his lead. Molyn's later career was less distinguished, and he seems then to have worked more as a draughtsman then a painter. He also etched.

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