Isack van Ostade, 'The Outskirts of a Village, with a Horseman', 1640s

The dappled light in Isack van Ostade’s atmospheric painting falls on the rump of a white horse and its rider’s back, making them the focus of the picture. The horse’s handsome tail and the shiny buttons on the rider’s coat are displayed in minute detail. Behind them, an eager dog is restrained by its master. Its lean companion sniffs at the earth, its ribs showing beneath the fur.

Cool early morning sunlight glows across the foreground, over the hen pecking at the rough turf to the two fine pigs, snouts to the ground, grubbing for food. A woman in a white cap carries two heavy buckets slung from the wooden yoke across her shoulders. She smiles as she chats to a man in a quilted jacket with a cloak slung over one arm. Behind her a small crowd gathers round the cow she has probably been milking.

Life seems to amble along in this painting: there’s time to stop and chat, for the horseman to pause and for the man beside him to communicate with his dogs. The countryside setting appears almost timeless, though van Ostade has explored the effects of time. Light flickers up the wall of the old, crumbling house, revealing the rich browns and ochre of the brick, the wood and the rusting metal. Smoke comes from the chimney although the house seems otherwise deserted, its thatch thinning and weeds growing from the roof. A dovecot under the eaves looks abandoned and the strange iron bars at one gaping window are broken and uneven.

The skeletal outline of the dead oak tree on the right is more prominent than the much larger living tree to the left. Van Ostade has given it a promise of life, with foliage sprouting from its trunk, while the younger tree seems almost to be growing from the side of the old house. It’s as if he’s showing nature as eternally renewing itself.

The painting is typical of the artist’s country scenes, with skilfully depicted objects and subtle colours and textures giving realism and mood. Despite the details to be explored in the foreground, the eye seems drawn along the path ahead of the horseman. Passing more figures in the shadows, you come to a gap in the distant trees. Beyond, in the far distance, is a church spire, little more than a grey needle outlined against the sky – and yet holding the attention. In a deeply Protestant country, perhaps van Ostade means us to understand this as the end of the rider’s journey and, by inference, the journey’s end for everyone.

Van Ostade was taught by his brother Adriaen, a painter of scenes of peasant life (for example, The Interior of an Inn). Although prolific, Isack died young and his painting career only lasted a decade, so his considerable promise was never fulfilled. You can see more of his work in the National Gallery’s collection, including A Farmyard and the delicate Winter Scene.