Landscape near Chiusi, Tuscany

Somewhere in the hills near Chiusi, an old Etruscan town in Tuscany, French painter Alexandre Desgoffe set up to capture this rugged valley in 1840. Golden slopes roll back toward a rocky ridge, dark clusters of trees dot the middle distance, and pale blue mountains melt into a hazy sky. The foreground is littered with boulders and loose stones, giving the scene a wild, untended feeling, as if the land had gone on this way for ages without anyone bothering to change it.

The painting has the loose, unfussy quality of an oil study, the kind of quick outdoor work artists made to record light and shape before returning to the studio for a bigger canvas. Desgoffe belonged to a long line of painters who journeyed to Italy to learn from the countryside firsthand, and here his palette stays close to the earth with browns, ochres, and soft greens under a washed-out sky. Nothing about it tries to impress, and that plain honesty is exactly what makes it easy to enjoy. It is a simple record of a warm afternoon in a place that has barely changed since the days of the ancient Etruscans.