After the Rain

Théodore Rousseau

National Gallery of Art

We look across a waterlogged path at a line of rust-red and bronze-brown trees that nearly span the width of this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted, which creates a blurred look. The land closest to us is in shadow and many details are difficult to make out, but pockets of bright, ice blue suggest water reflecting the pale sky above. The trees across from us have thin, spindly trunks and billowing dark red and brown canopies. A few swipes of brown, crimson red, and white suggest a person, perhaps on horseback, and perhaps a second person, a child, on the path under the trees. A line of shadow falls just beyond the trees, and a strip of brightly lit green lawn stretches back to the horizon, which comes a third of the way up the painting. More trees lining the horizon in the distance have ash-white trunks and copper-pink leaves. The blue sky above is veiled with a screen of thin fog-gray and parchment-white clouds.