Summer Landscape (The Road to Emmaus)

Esaias van de Velde was a pioneer in the development of naturalistic landscape painting in the Netherlands during the early seventeenth century. The Summer Landscape is one of the artist's earliest known paintings, and includes a biblical narrative, an element usually absent from his later works. A now lost pendant to the Oberlin picture depicted a winter landscape with the Flight into Egypt. The two seasons were symbolically juxtaposed with the two pilgrimages that bracketed Christ's life on earth, those to Egypt and Emmaus.