River Landscape with Cows

c. 1645 - c. 1650

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 43 cm × width 72.5 cm × thickness 1.5 cm
outer size: depth 7 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, lower right: A. cuÿp

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of two horizontally grained oak planks (17 and 26 cm), approx. 0.8 cm thick. The bottom edge has probably been trimmed slightly. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1622. The panel could have been ready for use by 1633, but a date in or after 1639 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends partially over the edges of the support at the top and on the left and right, but not over the bottom edge. It consists of somewhat transparent, coarse white and a few small orange pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends partially over the edges of the support at the top and on the left and right, but not over the bottom edge. The composition was built up from the back to the front (with a few exceptions) in no more than two layers, leaving the cows in reserve. A dark paint, possibly part of an undermodelling, is clearly visible with infrared photography, and also with the naked eye, adjacent to the cow on the left, where an earlier version of its legs shows through. Some of the lighter parts of the sky were applied over the cows to adjust their contours and make the animals stand out from the background. Several small highlights and details were added to them in the final stage. The grass in the foreground, the tree to the right, the bushes in the middle ground and those at the horizon were all placed on top of the sky and the water. The paint was loosely applied wet in wet, in many places with a stiff brush or with the top of a brush, which caused the underlying paint to be pushed away in a few spots. The paint layers are generally smooth, with some texture in the lighter, thicker parts.
Willem de Ridder, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

X-radiography: RMA, nos. 1056-58, 27 January 1959
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 December 2000
infrared photography: W. de Ridder, RMA, 31 March 2010
paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-A- 3957/1-2, 31 March 2010
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 31 March 2010

Condition

Fair. The open join, and a crack running across the entire width of the panel at approx. 7 cm from the top, have been reinforced with wooden blocks. Just below the join there is a smaller horizontal crack approx. 39 cm long. At some point a new piece of wood was inserted into the damaged bottom left corner. The increased transparency of the paint layer has added to the visibility of the underlying dark paint in places. Throughout there are small areas with slightly raised but stable paint running parallel to the grain of the wood. There are many retouchings, especially in the sky and in the dark areas in and around the cows. The varnish has turned matte here and there in retouched areas, and has yellowed severely.

Provenance

…; collection William Evans (1807-1881), Crumpsall Grange, Lancaster, first half of the 19th century;¹ by descent to his grandson, Murland de Grasse Evans (1874-1946), 2nd Baronet of Tubbendeny;²…; from the dealer E. Speelman, London, £12,500, to the museum, with the support of the Jubileumfonds, 1959

Object number: SK-A-3957

Credit line: Purchased with the support of N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken to Stichting Jubileumfonds 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 1639,³ but there are pictures of 1641 and 1645 on which he collaborated with his father.⁴ 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 1641.⁵

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 1655.⁶

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,⁷ 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

Many of Aelbert Cuyp’s pictures ended up in English collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them the present one, which was the first to be repatriated to the Netherlands in 1959. It was not a top-notch work, though. There are numerous retouchings in the sky and the abraded cows, and several large areas of paint loss had been filled in.

According to Chong it is an early-nineteenth-century pastiche that is loosely based on a series of original river landscapes.⁸ All of them show a group of cows by the water’s edge seen from a low vantage point. A few are standing in the river and are reflected in its almost smooth surface, while the background is coloured by the soft golden light of the evening sun. Interestingly, there is always one animal that has split off from the rest and waded out further into the river. The earliest of these pictures appears to be A Herdsman with Five Cows by a River in London;⁹ there are some boats on the water and the herdsman is crouched down on the bank. These elements have been shifted to the background or are missing from the other scenes.¹⁰ There is no consensus on the dating of this group of paintings. It is generally assumed that they were made around 1650, but some scholars have placed them in the mid-1640s and others as late as the mid-1650s.¹¹ More recently Kloek confirmed an origin in the mid-1640s and emphasized that if the work is indeed by Cuyp, it must be one of his first of cows by the waterside.¹²

The Rijksmuseum picture displays obvious similarities to this series of landscapes, but that does not make it a pastiche. More than that, there is clear evidence of Cuyp’s hand in the soft golden glow in the background, the loosely brushed cows and the naturalistic composition. The dendrochronology shows that the panel was most probably ready for use by 1639,¹³ which makes it unlikely that this is a nineteenth-century painting. Compositionally it is not as mature as the Budapest Cattle in a River, for example.¹⁴ The grouping of the cows on the right is clumsy, and it is hard to distinguish the individual animals from one another. Cuyp was obviously still searching for the best way of creating a balanced scene. It appears to be one of the earliest works in the series, and is closest to A Herdsman with Five Cows by a River in London, so a date just before 1650 would be the most plausible.¹⁵

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

J. Offerhaus, ‘Aelbert Cuyp, Koeien aan de waterkant’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 7 (1959), pp. 60-61; A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, p. 461, no. C43 (as ‘a late pastiche, perhaps early 19th-century’); W.T. Kloek, Aelbert Cuyp: Land, Water, Light, Amsterdam 2002, p. 22

Collection catalogues

1960, p. 80, no. 748 A4; 1976, p. 184, no. A 3957

Citation

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'Aelbert Cuyp, River Landscape with Cows, c. 1645 - c. 1650', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8190

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