Getty Museum
View of a Path in the Hague Forest, with Beggars at the Door of a Cottage
Creator
Jan LievensDutch Artist · 1607–1674
All works by this person →At age eight, Jan Lievens was already apprenticed to a local painter. The Leiden native then trained in Amsterdam with Pieter Lastman until, at the ripe old age of twelve, Lievens began his career as an independent artist. During the mid-1620s Lievens was a close friend of Rembrandt van Rijn, and they collaborated on paintings. Lievens's pictures from this period show his talent for working on a l
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1654–1658
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, on Asian paper
- Culture
- Dutch
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
A narrow road dappled with sunlight winds through a forest, past a cottage where a family is begging for money at the gate. A traveler with a backpack and stick rests in the shade at the path's edge, while in the distance a woman wearing a broad hat carries two buckets on a yoke. The traditional title of the drawing refers to a path in the Haagse Bos, a large forest around The Hague in the Netherlands. Although Jan Lievens produced this and most of his landscape drawings in the studio, he still managed to capture many minute details: the varied textures of leaves in sunlight, trees with delicate hatching on their trunks, and careful shading on the path to show the sunlight and shadows. Lievens used a rare and costly sheet of Japanese paper for this drawing. The slightly iridescent surface of the paper gives the composition an added warmth and rich sheen. Japanese paper was quite hard to find in the Netherlands during the 1600s, and the only other artist who used it often was Rembrandt, a friend and former colleague of Lievens.
The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.