Landscape with Herdsman and Cattle

c. 1660 - c. 1795

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 105.5 cm × width 102.5 cm
outer size: depth 11 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, bottom left (false): A. cuijp.

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been preserved, though somewhat damaged on the right. Cusping is vaguely visible at the top and on the left and right.
Preparatory layers The single, beige ground extends over the tacking edges. It contains white, fine orange and black, and a few large, dark brown pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the tacking edges. The composition was built up from the back to the front, using reserves for the main elements, apart from the two cows on the right. The paints were applied quickly, wet in wet. Bright green, yellow and whitish accents were placed over a brown layer, which serves as a mid-tone, as can readily be seen in the greenery in the foreground and in the trees. The clouds were loosely executed with sharp, keen-edged strokes. Blobs of paint denote the figures’ facial features. Only the face of the man on the left was rendered in slightly more detail, with dots for the eyes and lines for the nose and mouth. Several readjustments were made to the contours of the figures and animals in the final stage.
Willem de Ridder, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. 100/9-14 (no. 100/9 PLM and XRD), 20 August 2002
paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-A-78/1-2, 9 September 2010
infrared photography: W. de Ridder, RMA, 9 September 2010
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 9 September 2010

Condition

Fair. Both the ground and the paint are considerably damaged along the edges. The entire paint surface has a distinct crack pattern and is abraded, especially in the transparent browns. Discoloured retouchings are present overall. Here and there a greyish haze is visible, mainly in the foliage in the dark foreground. The varnish has yellowed slightly and is very matte at the retouchings.

Conservation

M. Zeldenrust, 1979: complete restoration

Provenance

…; ? from Onderwater, Dordrecht, fl. 1,100, to the dealer Jan Danser Nijman (c. 1735-97), The Hague, c. 1795;¹ from whom, fl. 1,200, to Gerrit van der Pot (1732-1807), Lord of Groeneveld, Rotterdam, 25 April 1796;² his sale, Rotterdam (Gebr. Van Ryp), 6 June 1808 sqq., no. 26 (‘Hoog 40, en breed 38¼ duim [104.7 x 100 cm]. D*. Een Land- en Riviergezicht, zijnde een Morgenstond. Op den voorgrond vertoont zich eene drift Beesten, geleid door een Veehoeder en Boerin, beiden op Ezels gezeten, waarbij een Boeren jongen te voet gaat; verder ziet men Gewassen, hoog Geboomte en Bergen.’), fl. 3,860, to A.A. Stratenus, for the museum³

Object number: SK-A-78

The artist

Aelbert Cuyp (Dordrecht 1620 - Dordrecht 1691)

Aelbert Cuyp was baptized in the Reformed Augustijnenkerk in Dordrecht in October 1620 and was a scion of an artistic family. His grandfather Gerrit Gerritsz was a glass painter from Limburg who settled in Dordrecht before 1585, and his father Jacob Gerritsz was one of the city’s leading portraitists in the first half of the seventeenth century. The latter trained his own half-brother Benjamin and probably taught Aelbert as well.

Aelbert Cuyp could turn his hand to pretty well every genre – cityscapes, landscapes and, to a lesser extent, biblical and mythological subjects and portraits. His earliest independent landscapes date from 1639,⁴ but there are pictures of 1641 and 1645 on which he collaborated with his father.⁵ Aelbert took care of the scenery and Jacob did the portraits in them. Drawn sights of The Hague, Utrecht, Amersfoort and Rhenen show that he went on one or more trips through the provinces of Holland, Utrecht and Gelderland, and one of those works was used for another painting that he made with his father in 1641.⁶

Aelbert Cuyp’s landscapes from the early 1640s, only a few of which bear the year of execution, are clearly influenced by Jan van Goyen. Around 1645 he began taking an interest in the Dutch Italianate painters, chiefly Jan Both, who had returned from Italy in 1642. Initially this led to his creation of imaginary Arcadian spaces drenched in a southern light, but after about 1650 his depictions of Dutch city and countryside also took on the golden brown glow of the Italian evening sun, in contrast to a cool sky. There is some uncertainty about the precise evolution of these works, because none of them are dated after 1645 – unlike a few portraits that Cuyp made in the 1650s, the last of them in 1655.⁷

Around 1651-52 Cuyp went on a journey to Nijmegen and from there to Elten and Cleves in Germany. The record of this can be seen in a whole series of sketches and paintings of the region. In the 1650s Cuyp was commissioned by a number of leading families in Dordrecht, and in 1658 he himself became a member of the elite through his marriage to Cornelia Boschman, the widow of one of the regents. Although her wills of 1659, 1664 and 1679 mention works that could have been made after that date, it seems that Cuyp abandoned art when he married. Houbraken says that he taught Barent van Calraat in the 1660s and modernized an earlier picture of his in that period,⁸ but there are no paintings that must have been executed after the 1650s. Cuyp now began serving in a variety of administrative and ecclesiastical posts. In 1659 he was elected deacon of the Reformed Church, a function that he also carried out from 1667 to 1672, when he was appointed an elder. In 1673, 1675 and 1676 he was a governor of the Plague House, and from 1680 to 1682 a member of the High Court of Justice of South Holland. In 1689, two years before his death, Cuyp was taxed 210 guilders, which meant that he had a considerable fortune of 42,000 guilders.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

References
M. Balen, Beschryvinge der stad Dordrecht […], Dordrecht 1677, pp. 186, 909; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 248-49; R. van Eynden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, sedert de helft der XVIII eeuw, I, Haarlem 1816, pp. 381-85; C. Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd, VI, Amsterdam 1864, pp. 308-10; G.H. Veth, ‘Over de Cuyps en Bol’, De Nederlandsche Spectator 29 (1884), pp. 117-18; G.H. Veth, ‘Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp en Benjamin Cuyp’, Oud Holland 2 (1884), pp. 233-90, esp. pp. 256-90 (documents); G.H. Veth, ‘Aanteekeningen omtrent eenige Dordrechtsche schilders, XIV: Aelbert Cuyp’, Oud Holland 6 (1888), pp. 142-48; Lilienfeld in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, VIII, Leipzig 1913, pp. 227-30; A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, pp. 548-67 (documents); Seelig in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XXIII, Munich/Leipzig 1999, p. 235

Entry

According to an entry in the diary of Gerrit van der Pot, the art dealer Jan Danser Nijman bought this painting around 1795 in Dordrecht from someone called Onderwater, who had it hanging in his house as an overdoor.⁹ As chance would have it, Aelbert Cuyp’s only daughter Arendina (1659-1702) married a brewer called Pieter Onderwater (1651-1728) in 1690, who bought the Dordwijk country estate outside Dordrecht in 1692.¹⁰ In 1816 Van Eynden and Van der Willigen thought it likely that the property, which was still in the hands of Pieter’s descendants, originally belonged to Cuyp himself, and several later authors accepted this as the truth.¹¹ They also said that ‘a number of paintings that he made in his youth as well as at a more advanced age and depicting subjects of every kind are still found there today and, as we have been informed, there were formerly far more of his notable works of art there’.¹² This created the idea that paintings that originally came from Cuyp’s own house had been sold in the recent past by the Onderwater family, and that one of them was this Landscape with Herdsman and Cattle in Gerrit van der Pot’s collection. It is no longer possible to discover whether the Rijksmuseum picture really did come from Dordwijk and whether there were many more in the manor. In 1856 it was radically remodelled, and nothing is left of the former decoration. One thing, though, is certain, and that is that Cuyp never owned the estate.¹³

There is no consensus on the attribution of this painting. Stechow regarded it as a crucial work marking the transition from the manner inspired by Both to Cuyp’s mature, late style.¹⁴ Chong and Kloek are doubtful and see the hand of a pupil or follower.¹⁵ It is very comparable in every respect to Herdsman and Cattle at a Bridge in Madrid.¹⁶ It, too, has a dark strip of land in the foreground, a body of water beyond and a distant vista in which the pale pink sky and the landscape merge almost imperceptibly. That authentic picture, however, has a more logical structure. There is a better distinction between light and shade, which makes it clear that the evening is drawing in,¹⁷ and in addition the clouds have more force and volume, the animals and the figures have been worked up better, and the foliage is crisper. Although there are a few similarities in the painting technique, such as the treatment of details in the foreground, there are also major differences that stand out particularly plainly when a direct comparison is made. The cows in the Rijksmuseum picture, for instance, were executed uncertainly and clumsily, while those in Madrid are sharp and subtle. Something that is atypical for Cuyp is the canvas’s square format. That has always been explained as a consequence of its supposed function as an overdoor, but that is far from sure. In any case, the suspicion that the work is not by Cuyp but by a pupil or follower seems justified.¹⁸

Although the painting is not up to the standard one would expect of Cuyp it did serve as a source of inspiration for the later Dordrecht artist Jacob van Strij (1765-1815), the composition of whose Landscape with Cattle Driver and Shepherd in the Rijksmuseum is directly based on it.¹⁹ The motif of a herdsman on a donkey also recurs in several works by him and other Cuyp followers.²⁰

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, V, London 1834, p. 313, no. 106 (as Aelbert Cuyp); E.-J.-T. Thoré (pseud. W. Bürger), Musées de la Hollande, I, Paris 1858, pp. 103-04 (as Aelbert Cuyp); C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, II, Esslingen/Paris 1908, p. 117, no. 407 (as Aelbert Cuyp); W. Stechow, ‘Significant Dates on Some Seventeenth Century Dutch Landscape Paintings’, Oud Holland 75 (1960), pp. 79-92, esp. pp. 89-90 (as Aelbert Cuyp); C.J. de Bruyn Kops, ‘Kanttekeningen bij het nieuw verworven landschap van Aelbert Cuyp: En enige bijzonderheden over de waardering en export van zijn werk in het verleden’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 13 (1965), pp. 161-76, esp. pp. 174-75 (as Aelbert Cuyp); A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, pp. 434-35, no. B10 (as ‘not certainly by Aelbert Cuyp’); W.T. Kloek, Aelbert Cuyp: Land, Water, Light, Amsterdam 2002, pp. 42-43 (as Studio of Aelbert Cuyp)

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 15, no. 66 (as Aelbert Cuyp); 1843, p. 13, no. 65 (as Aelbert Cuyp; ‘painted in the sky’); 1853, p. 8, no. 60 (as Aelbert Cuyp; fl. 15,000); 1858, p. 26, no. 59 (as Aelbert Cuyp); 1885, p. 10, no. 64 (as Aelbert Cuyp); 1903, p. 78, no. 745 (as Aelbert Cuyp); 1934, p. 77, no. 745 (as Aelbert Cuyp); 1960, p. 79, no. 745 (as Aelbert Cuyp); 1976, p. 184, no. A 78 (as Aelbert Cuyp)

Citation

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'follower of Aelbert Cuyp, Landscape with Herdsman and Cattle, c. 1660 - c. 1795', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8192

(accessed 20 September 2024 03:10:40).