A shaft of sunlight illuminates a bone-white, barren tree trunk that has fallen across a stream within a dense wood in this horizontal landscape painting. The water closest to us is deep in shadow, and the surface closer to the opposite bank is a shimmering moss green. One spiraling, ash-brown tree trunk rises out of the stream to our right of center, and another hunched, gnarled trunk grows from the far bank, to our left. Tiny in scale, two dogs stand at the water’s edge between the gnarled tree and the fallen trunk beyond. The dirt earth where the tree had stood is sand-colored, and it is…
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Departure for the Hunt in the Pontine Marshes

painter Horace Vernet (French, 1789 - 1863)

1833

Medium
oil on canvas
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
overall: 100.01 × 150.65 cm (39 3/8 × 59 5/16 in.) ; framed: 135.89 × 170.82 × 16.51 cm (53 1/2 × 67 1/4 × 6 1/2 in.)
Culture
French
Museum
National Gallery of Art, CF
Credit line
Chester Dale Fund
Rights
Public domain (NGA Open Access, CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed

View at the National Gallery of Art