Highway of Combes-la-Ville

A wide dirt road cuts across the canvas in Giovanni Boldini's "Highway of Combes-la-Ville," painted in 1873 during the artist's time in France. Travelers, horses, and carriages move along the dusty path, passing beneath a cluster of thin, tall trees that break up the flat countryside. Boldini, an Italian painter who lived from 1842 to 1931, made his reputation later with elegant portraits of stylish women in Paris, so this humble rural scene reveals a quieter chapter of his career.

The sky steals the show, filling more than half the painting with fat white clouds rolling across a clear blue expanse. Boldini worked with loose, rapid brushstrokes, echoing the Impressionist painters who were shaking things up in France at exactly this moment. The people and wagons are just quick suggestions rather than carefully finished figures, which gives the whole thing an easy, unfussed feeling. This is everyday life on a French road, worlds away from the glittering ballrooms that would one day make his name.