Artist: Albert Jansz Klomp
Date: 1688
Size: 27 x 35 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
Albert Klomp probably painted this picture as a companion piece to another landscape with cattle (see SK-A-161; also fig. a). Works of his were often referred to as pairs in seventeenth-century Amsterdam probate inventories,7 and as far as is known these two have never been separated. Iconographically, though, there is no reason to hang them beside each other – at most there is a visual relationship. Clearly inspired by the oeuvre of Paulus Potter, both paintings are of different kinds of cattle with a dune (the present one) and a river background respectively. The compositions have a diagonal structure with dense vegetation on one side and an open landscape on the other. Several elements have been taken from earlier works by both Klomp himself and Potter. The two cows and the solitary sheep on the left in the river scene, for example, are found in exactly the same poses in a much larger, undated picture by Klomp.8 The reclining cow with the goat in front of it, which is the central motif of this dune landscape, is derived from Paulus Potter’s Herdsmen with Cattle of 1651.9 There are at least two other versions of the latter, including one in the Rijksmuseum which is now regarded as a copy.10 It is not known which of these variants Klomp used, but it is not inconceivable that he had an image of the Potter in his studio, for the same reclining cow and goat feature in several other works of his.11 The fact that this motif still occurs in cattle scenes in the eighteenth century testifies to its popularity.12 There are only a few clues to establish a chronology for these two pictures, which are clear evidence of Klomp’s mastery of the subject. The cows with their slightly impasted heads are more successful than those in his earliest known works of 1657 and 1662. There is a single dated painting to which they can be related. The goat copied from Potter in the present scene also features in a Landscape with Cattle and Herdsmen of 1665.13 For the moment that provides no more than a rough origin in the mid-1660s. Erlend de Groot, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
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