Two men and a dog walk or stand on a rutted dirt road that stretches into the distance in front of us, between a grove of trees to our left and a shallow, narrow canal or ditch to our right in this horizontal landscape painting. The horizon comes about a quarter of the way up the composition, and puffy white clouds float across a pale blue sky above. Outlined against the sky, the leaves of some of the trees to our left are olive or moss green, and others are golden yellow. Tiny in scale and a distance from us, the men wear dark, brimmed hats and dark pants and shoes or boots. One wears a crimson-red shirt or jacket and the other has something white, presumably a sack, flung across one shoulder over a dark jacket. The men walk or pause near a short row of three trees between the path and the canal to our right. Farther back and almost lost in shadow to our left, a third person is painted as a dark silhouette walking near the grove of trees. The water in the canal shimmers between marine blue and pale rust brown. The area beyond the canal is flat fields. Painted as a faint gray silhouette along the far distant horizon, the spires of a church and other buildings indicate a town in the deep distance to our right. A few dots of dark paint suggest birds flying high over the fields to our right. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner, making the first two letters into an intertwined monogram: “MHobbema.”

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com

   In this quiet landscape scene, two men chat as they amble along a rutted road atop a dike that separates verdant woods from low-lying fields and their drainage ditches. The substantial buildings, churches, and towers that rise along the horizon may represent Amsterdam, Meindert Hobbema’s native city, but the town is so distant that it barely intrudes on the painting’s overriding sense of nature.

   The light and delicate quality of this work is characteristic of paintings executed by Hobbema in the late 1650s, before he began his apprenticeship with Jacob van Ruisdael, who moved to Amsterdam from Haarlem in 1657. The subtle mood of this scene is strikingly different from the more robust landscapes Hobbema executed from the early 1660s onward as a result of Van Ruisdael’s influence. The distinctive signature MHobbema (with the M and H joined) also points to an early work.

   Hobbema was more interested in capturing the gentle rhythms of nature than the human presence, and his reticence to include many figures probably derived from his relative weakness as a figure painter. Hobbema did depict three people, although small in scale. A tiny figure, barely discernable along the tree line near the curve of the dike, amplifies the suggestion of depth and distance. The two men in the middle of the road, one wearing a red jacket and one carrying a white sack on his shoulder, actually serve another important function: not only do they provide an engaging pictorial accent that enhances the scene’s pleasant charm, but they also suggest those quiet moments of communication that are so important in human existence.

 

百度翻译：http://fanyi.baidu.com