A River in a Meadow

This composition is largely comprised of three horizontal bands: empty foreground, screen of trees, and sky. These broad registers are animated by nimble details, such as the complementary curves of the path and the river, or the straight line of figures that begins with the cow at left and leads the eye to the far bank. Light is deployed as a unifying element, a feature of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting that Rousseau transposed to a French setting.

Credit: Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900