River Landscape with Cows – (Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp

Date: 1650

Size: 91 x 113 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

Eight cows bathed in warm sunlight stand and lie on a riverbank carpeted in mossy green in this horizontal painting. The cows are amber, ginger, or tawny brown, bone white, or black, and all have short, curving horns. Seven are clustered closely together, at the bottom center of the painting. There, one tawny red cow with a white face looks at or toward us as it lies at the middle of the grouping, legs tucked under her big body. The eighth cow is black with a white face, and lies just to our left of the group. Behind the cows, to our right, a hill rises about halfway up the right side of the composition. Three men meet at the top. One man is on horseback with his back to us, while the other two stand to the right holding tall staffs. They are dressed in sage-green, tan, or peanut-brown tunics and knee-length pants, and they all wear hats. Beyond the cows, the silvery-blue river extends back to a row of low trees in the deep distance on the horizon, which comes about a quarter of the way up the composition. A few sailboats with white sails navigate the waterway. The sky, which takes up about three-quarters of the composition, is filled with puffy white, pale gray, and shell-pink clouds. A shaft of sunlight breaks through the clouds near the top center of the composition and falls toward the men on the hill. Birds flying in a loose band are painted with a few swipes of brown, tiny in the distance. The artist signed the lower right, “A:Cuijp.”