Nicolas Poussin, 'Landscape with Travellers Resting', about 1638-9

A country track leads from the left foreground between two outcrops of tree-covered rocks, around a limpid pool and towards the distant mountains. In the foreground a man wearing a classical tunic rests by the side of the track. He looks towards a second man in the middle distance, who ties his sandal. In the background, a third man walks along the track beside the water.

This is one of Poussin’s earliest landscapes, painted in the late 1630s. Unlike many of his works, the picture does not seem to have a literary or religious source. Poussin based this scene on the countryside around Rome where he is known to have drawn landscape studies, but at this stage in his career he had limited experience of landscape painting. Here, he tentatively created an ideal landscape by building up contrasting areas of dark and light and by highlighting these areas with the three figures. Trees and rocky cliffs frame the scene and lead our eye into the distance. The foliage is incredibly detailed and in places individual leaves are visible and picked out by the sunlight.

This picture – like another of Poussin’s landscapes in our collection, Landscape with a Man scooping Water from a Stream – was probably painted for the artist’s friend and patron Cassiano dal Pozzo, or for Cassiano’s younger brother, Carlo Antonio. Although the paintings have always been together in the same collections, and both show three figures in a landscape, they were probably not made as pendants to be hung together, and may have been painted a year or two apart.