Artist: Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp
Date: 1725
Size: 102 x 135 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
At first sight this painting looks like a typical Aelbert Cuyp. The subject of a young herdsman with some cows in a hilly landscape, the castle ruins in the background and the southern light are all familiar features of his oeuvre. However, the illumination is far removed from his cool evening skies with clouds touched with gold from the 1650s, but it does have some affinity with works that he must have made around 1645.12 The Rijksmuseum picture, though, is far weaker than the ones from that period. The cloudy sky is poorly defined, and the boy and the highly foreshortened cow beside him are only very schematically detailed. They are not well integrated in the environment, and the herder is far from relaxed. Chong regarded this as a late copy after Landscape with Herdsmen and Cattle in Cologne, which remarkably enough is exactly the same size (fig. a).13 The two scenes are not a precise match. The backgrounds differ, and the one in Cologne has gained a shepherdess and some sheep. Although there are doubts about the autograph nature of that work, it is far better executed than the one in the Rijksmuseum.14 That is very evident in the figure of the herdsman, whose face is more accurately rendered and whose pose is more relaxed and natural. In turn, the Cologne landscape, whether it is by Cuyp or a follower, is indebted to other pictures by the master. The cows, one reclining and seen from the side, the other standing frontally towards the viewer, are often found in his paintings, although not always together.15 Boy herders reclining or sleeping also often feature in Cuyp’s oeuvre.16 It is not certain where or when this painting was made. It seems that it is first mentioned in a French sale of 1778, so it must predate that.17 The Cologne landscape was already in England by the middle of the eighteenth century.18 Since the Rijksmuseum picture cannot have been made without reference to the one in Cologne, it should be placed in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Erlend de Groot, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
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