Just picture, if you can, a painting.

We're sitting on a little hill overlooking a road.

It's a nice day.

Standing to our left is the lower half of a twisted dead tree.

smooth where the bark has been stripped or fallen off, some vines twirling up

around it. The sky has a peachy late afternoon quality. The road, winding to our right down the

hill, has a great ankle deep puddle across it. A person wearing blue shorts and carrying a sack of something or other

is guiding some cows across the puddle toward a quaint Dutch city in the distance.

You got to wonder, what does it all mean?

This is from the 17th century, an artist named Yakov and Roysdale,

and he's really one of the great landscape painters of his time.

Alan Chong is the director of the Courier Museum in Manchester,

New Hampshire, where this painting,

view of Edgmon by the sea, lives.

And what he'll tell you is that there are all sorts of theories about why Von Roesdale painted this scene.

But we don't really know.

Landscape is a kind of art for which there is very little to say.

You know, one has to project a lot of extra meaning

into what you see, and it's kind of open-ended.

And maybe for that reason, this kind of art hasn't always commanded a lot of respect.

For example, a group of Renaissance-era Italian critics once said,

That landscapes, oh, you know, they're for simple minds, you know, they're for people who really don't really understand the complexities of classical allegory and historical scenes.

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