River Landscape with Cows

1645/1650

Aelbert Cuyp

Artist, Dutch, 1620 - 1691

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.”

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Eight cows quietly chew their cud on the bank of a river while on the dike above two herdsmen talk to a passing rider, their distant forms accented by shafts of late afternoon light breaking through the billowing clouds. To the seventeenth-century Dutch, the well-fed cow symbolized the nation’s prosperity. Milk, butter, and cheese were important components of the Dutch diet, and the succulent cheeses marketed at Gouda and Alkmaar were among the main export products to France, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Iberian peninsula.

Aelbert Cuyp was not the first Dutch artist to focus on a herd of cows, but he portrayed them with a dignity lacking in similar works by his predecessors. Throughout his career, Cuyp remained interested in depicting rural Dutch landscapes, but by the late 1640s he had started to incorporate Italianate elements, derived from the works of Dutch artists who had studied in Italy. Cuyp dramatized his images by portraying his cattle within a generalized, arcadian landscape. By placing his viewer at a low vantage point and silhouetting the cattle against a light-filled background, Cuyp imbued his scene with an aura of pastoral well-being. The "single-wing composition," in which a large diagonal form fills the lower right quadrant of the panel, is characteristic of Dutch landscape paintings of the 1640s and 1650s.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 47

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on panel

  • Credit Line

    Gift of Family Petschek (Aussig)

  • Dimensions

    overall: 68 x 90.2 cm (26 3/4 x 35 1/2 in.)
    framed: 91.1 x 112.7 x 5.1 cm (35 7/8 x 44 3/8 x 2 in.)

  • Accession

    1986.70.1

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: River Landscape with Cows, 1645/1650

This horizontal painting shows a group of eight light-skinned musicians and onlookers gathered closely around a rectangular, carpet-covered table. The front edge of the table runs parallel to the bottom edge of the painting, and seems close to us. Shown from about the waist up, the men and women’s vivid lapis-blue, coral-red, buttercup-yellow, lilac-purple, and moss-green garments fall in crisp folds. Bright reflections on the fabric suggest a satin-like material. Two women wear feathers in their hair and one man’s hat is plumed. One man, wearing crimson red and black, sits with his back to us to our left on the near side of the table. He holds the neck of a bass viol, about the size of a cello, with his left hand, and points to pages of an open music book with the bow in his right hand. The other people cluster on the far side of the table. A man to the left plays a violin; a woman at the center plays a guitar-sized bandora, and a woman to our right plays a lute. The musicians, along with a man who leans over the table from between the two women, look down at the music books. A young man behind the woman at the center holds up a glass of pale liquid with his right hand as he touches his left forefinger to his smiling lips. A man and woman stand close together in the background to our right, in the top right corner of the canvas.

Scholarly Series:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Caroline Anne, 4th marchioness of Ely [1856-1917, née Caroline Anne Caithness], Eversley Park, Winchmore Hill, London; (sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 3 August 1917, no. 43); (C. Huggins, London);[1] sold 9 August 1917 to (Thos. Agnew & Sons, Ltd., London, and the dealer H.M. Clark); sold September 1919 to Gaston Neuman, Brussels.[2] (sale, Frederik Muller & Co., Amsterdam, 30 November–6 December 1920, 1st day, no. 1024, bought in); (Frederik Muller & Co., Amsterdam), until at least 1922;[3] possibly (Steinmeyer, Lucerne), in 1923;[4] (Paul Cassirer & Co., Berlin), by 1924.[5] Ignaz Petschek, Aussig (Ústí nad Labem), Czechoslovakia, by 1927; by inheritance to his son, Frank C. Petschek [d. 1963], Aussig (Ústí nad Labem), and New York;[6] by inheritance to his daughters, Elisabeth de Picciotto, New York, and Maria Petschek Smith, Falls Church, Virginia; gift 1986 to NGA.
[1] Letter, 12 November 1952, Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd. to Frank Petschek, copy in NGA curatorial files.
[2] Many details of the provenance, in particular the specifics of Agnew’s ownership and sale of the painting, were researched by Alan Chong, and provided to Arthur Wheelock in letters from 1988 and 1990 (some undated), in NGA curatorial files.
[3] Muller lent the painting to exhibitions in 1921 and 1922.
[4] Steinmeyer’s possible ownership is cited in the files at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague; see their letter of 21 April 1951 to Frank Petschek, copy in NGA curatorial files.
[5] Cassirer lent the painting to a 1924 exhibition.
[6] The picture was removed from Czechoslovakia in, or shortly before, 1938 by Frank Petschek.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1921

  • Pintores holandeses dibujos, escultura, lithografia y arte aplicado, llevados por la cómision del consejo para las artes representativas de la comision holandesa en el extranjero, Madrid, 1921, no. 51.

1922

  • Udstilling af Aeldre og Nyere Hollandsk Malerkunst og Moderne Anvendt Kunst, Copenhagen, 1922, no. 30.

1924

  • Tentoonstelling van Werken door Dortsche Meesters, Pictura, Amsterdam, 1924, no. 10.

2001

  • Aelbert Cuyp, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery, London; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2001-2002, no. 19, repro.

Bibliography

1907

  • Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century. 8 vols. Translated by Edward G. Hawke. London, 1907-1927: 2(1909):79, no. 243.

  • Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis. Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts. 10 vols. Esslingen and Paris, 1907-1928: 2(1908):75, no. 243.

1975

  • Reiss, Stephen. Aelbert Cuyp. Boston, 1975: 206.

1987

  • Sutton, Peter C. Masters of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. Exh. cat. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art. Boston, 1987: 294.

1988

  • Chong, Alan. "In 't verbeelden van Slachtdieren.'" In Meesterlijk vee--Nederlandse veeschilders, 1600-1900. Edited by C. Boschma. Exh. cat. Dordrechts Museum; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden. Zwolle, 1988: 82, repro.

1992

  • Chong, Alan. "Aelbert Cuyp and the Meanings of Landscape." Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1992: 362-363, no. 121.

1995

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, 1995: 33-36, color repro. 35.

2001

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Aelbert Cuyp. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery, London; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Washington, 2001: no. 19, 130-131, 195, repro.

2014

  • Bijl, Martin, and Wouter Kloek. "A Painting Re-Attributed to Aebert Cuyp: Connoisseurship and Technical Research." The Burlington Magazine 156, no. 1331 (February 2014): 91-98, figs. 20, 25, 26, 30, 32.

  • Wheelock, Arthur K, Jr. "The Evolution of the Dutch Painting Collection." National Gallery of Art Bulletin no. 50 (Spring 2014): 2-19, repro.

Inscriptions

lower right: A:Cuijp

Wikidata ID

Q20177210

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