In the Forest

Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña

National Gallery of Art

A path enclosed almost entirely with trees stretches into a dense, sun-dappled forest before us in this horizontal landscape painting. The trunks, leaves, undergrowth, and part of the path closest to us are painted in shadowy tones of ash brown, brick red, and muted green. Sunlight from the left burnishes the canopies of trees in the middle distance to a muted gold. A patch of azure-blue sky is glimpsed above that copse. Deep in shadow, a woman wearing a dark garment and white cap sits huddled at the foot of a tree on the left. The path becomes deeply shadowed again as it moves into the far distance. The artist signed and dated the lower left, “N. Diaz, '74.”