Landscape

In the pictureAcross the front of the wide picture, rocky hills mixed with reddish brown and white roll like waves, with a bright strip like a path running back between them. In the middle stand a few round, dark masses of trees and three slender-trunked trees, and on the left a purplish gray hill slopes down at an angle. Behind, a blue mountain range lies low, and in the sky bands of gray-blue cloud drift horizontally amid cream-colored light. The thicket at front left is gray-green, brown brushstrokes depicting branches run along the right edge, and the initials 'DC' are at lower left.

BackgroundAlexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803–1860) made his name painting the landscapes and people of the East after traveling in Ottoman lands in the late 1820s. This watercolor is a landscape of about 1840 whose location has not been identified; on a small sheet of 17.1×29.2 cm, it creates a wide space with only a few colors, brown, green, and blue. The way the rocks and fields are laid in simply with a broad brush has been compared to the landscapes of the Barbizon painters who worked around the Forest of Fontainebleau. He died at Fontainebleau, and this picture entered the collection in 1909 through the Rogers Fund.

Puzzle tipThe picture is about 1.7 times as wide as it is tall, so the pieces are flattened horizontally. Fit the dark tree masses and slender trunks in the middle first, then set the height of the horizon with the blue mountain range. Join the rocks in front by following the direction of their reddish brown and white streaks, and separate the sky top from bottom using the cream band of light and the gray-blue bands of cloud. The 'DC' piece at lower left marks the corner. 48 pieces suits it.