Italian landscape with soldiers by Karel Dujardin

Karel Dujardin's 'Italian Landscape with Soldiers' (1670) at the Rijksmuseum is a masterful small-scale Italianate scene, a golden, tranquil country day with a mounted soldier, a donkey, a goat, and a vast plain stretching to a hazy horizon.

But the calm is a cover story. Dujardin spent two long stretches in Italy, and his career seemed to thrive on it, until his second stay collapsed. He racked up enormous debts in Rome, fled the city in the middle of the night, and returned to Amsterdam in disgrace. Back home, he kept painting these impossibly serene Italian views; collectors wanted them, and they could not get enough.

What makes the painting's survival remarkable is what happened next. When Dujardin died in 1678, his friends physically hid his artworks. Creditors were circling, ready to seize everything of value. The hiding worked. Paintings that could have been broken up and sold piecemeal survived intact and entered public collections.

So when you look at this warm Italian afternoon, the dog resting at the horse's feet, the golden sky, the quiet ruins on the hill, look also at what isn't painted: the stress, the debts, and the desperate scramble that let this canvas outlive its maker's scandal.