Landscape with a Grazing Horse

A single tree stands tall at the center of this landscape by James Dickson Innes, its dark green canopy stretching against a sky full of soft pink and white clouds. Behind it rises a green hillside, thick with foliage and dotted with trees, while a lone horse grazes in the open field below. The reddish tones of a small building peek through the greenery, and the whole scene carries a quiet, gentle mood. Innes was a Welsh painter with a deep love for the countryside of Wales and France, and that fondness shows in the tender way he handled this hill and its lone tree.

The style here belongs to Post-Impressionism, built from loose brushstrokes and blocks of color rather than careful detail. Innes dabbed the clouds on in creamy pinks and layered the hillside with rapid strokes of green, working with a speed that came partly from necessity. He suffered from tuberculosis and understood his time was running out, dying at only twenty-seven. Despite that short life, he produced work brimming with feeling, and this calm view of a horse in a field shows just how much he could pack into an ordinary afternoon in the open air.