Landscape with Cows and Young Herdsman

c. 1675 - c. 1725

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 102 cm × width 135.3 cm
outer size: depth 8.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, lower left (false): A. cùÿp

Technical notes

Support The slightly coarse, plain-weave canvas, with an average of approx. 8 horizontal by 7 vertical threads per centimetre, has been lined. All tacking edges have been removed. Cusping is clearly visible at the top and bottom, and vaguely on the right. A pronounced crack caused by the original strainer or the result of folding runs down the left side.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends up to the current edges of the support. The first, light orange layer is somewhat transparent. The second ground is a warm light grey and contains many small spiky black, some bright orange and a few large white pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography (analogue).
Paint layers The paint extends up to the current edges of the support. The first lay-in was done using transparent browns, which are still partly noticeable in the darker areas, for example in the boy’s trousers. The light grey of the second ground layer shows through wherever this undermodelling has remained visible. In most areas, however, the browns serve as a mid-tone which was worked up with thicker and more opaque light paints, with dark ones for the shadowy areas. The composition was built up basically from the back to the front, using reserves for the main elements. The sky was executed first, then most of the trees, followed by the mountain on the left, with their contours extending slightly over the sky. The paint was mostly applied wet in wet with firm brushwork and texture, especially in the lighter areas and in the sky. The branches and leaves standing out against it were executed sharply but with a loose hand over the already dried sky. For the outlines and highlights of the light hairs on the cows thick paints were used with fuzzy, coarse brushwork. The greenery was carefully positioned and rendered in such a way as to create a strong sense of depth: the further to the front the thicker the paint, the more highlights and details. The boy’s face and anatomy, and the sky are sketchy, whereas the recumbent cow is far more detailed. In certain places, such as the highlighted vegetation in the foreground, the paint was rather dry and thick and only seems to have caught the higher points of the underlying layer. The contour of the mountain was changed during the painting process.
Willem de Ridder, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: RMA, 1950
X-radiography: RMA, nos. 505-09, 24 October 1950
technical report: M. van de Laar / W. de Ridder, RMA, 26 October 1998
paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. 100/15-18 (no. 100/18 PLM and XRD), 20 August 2002
paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-A-3754/1-3, 29 April 2010
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 29 April 2010

Condition

Fair. There are many paint losses on all sides and the paint layer is strongly abraded, mainly in the darker areas. Some of the retouchings have discoloured, especially at the edges. Whitish efflorescent patches have materialized, mainly in the greens of the leaves of the tall plant in the foreground, which have also become transparent. The varnish has yellowed, somewhat unevenly in the sky, and has turned dull with several matte areas, mainly at retouchings, and has lost some of its saturation.

Conservation

F. Leedham: canvas lined (c. 1830-60, precise date unknown)
conservator unknown, c., 1950: canvas relined

Provenance

…; ? anonymous sale [Provenant du Cabinet de Mr. Silvestre], Paris (Chariot and Paillet), 16 November 1778, no. 77 (‘[…] un Paysage sur le devant duquel est une Vache couchée & forte, comme demi-nature: plus-loin, un autre en raccourci; un jeune Garçon est assis sur un Plan elévé, & paroît les garder. Des lointaines & un Ciel touché avec goût, terminent la composition de ce beau morceau, qui est peint sur une toile. Hauteur 38 pouces, largeur 50 pouces [102.6 x 135 cm]’), 420 livres, to Jacques Lenglier;¹…; ? anonymous sale [Prince de Conti], Paris (Francastel and Boileau), 15 March 1779, no. 163 (‘Un Paysage, dans lequel on voit deux Boeufs, dont un couché & l’autre debout; & près d’eux, un jeune Pâtre & quelques arbres. La gauche offre de beaux lointains, dans lesquels on apperçoit la Tour d’un Château ruiné. […] Hauteur 36 pouces, largeur 48 pouces [97.2 x 129.6 cm]’), 350 livres, to the dealer Louis-François-Jacques Boileau;²…;³ collection Major Sir Bertram Hardy, Bart, Dunstal Hall, Burton upon Trent;⁴…; from A.J. Tooth, £SLX,⁵ to the dealer P. & D. Colnaghi, London, 1950;⁶ from whom, £2,750, to the museum, as a gift from the Fotocommissie, November 1950

Object number: SK-A-3754

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum

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 1639,⁷ but there are pictures of 1641 and 1645 on which he collaborated with his father.⁸ 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 1641.⁹

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 1655.¹⁰

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,¹¹ 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

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

Literature

A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss., New York University 1992, p. 435, under no. B11

Collection catalogues

1960, p. 80, no. 748 A2; 1976, p. 184, no. A 3754

Citation

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'manner of Aelbert Cuyp, Landscape with Cows and Young Herdsman, c. 1675 - c. 1725', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8191

(accessed 23 September 2024 00:23:23).

Figures

fig. a Aelbert Cuyp, *Landscape with Herdsmen and Cattle*, c. 1650-55. Oil on canvas, 101.5 x 135 cm. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln/Wolfgang F. Meier