River Landscape with Cows, Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1645 - c. 1650 – (Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp

Date: 1650

Size: 43 x 73 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

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