Karel Dujardin, 'A Woman with Cattle and Sheep in an Italian Landscape', 1650-5

A young woman sits on a grassy bank spinning wool, distaff tucked under one arm. With a half-smile on her face, she looks with great concentration at her fingers untangling a lump in the wool. The twirling spindle hangs from her other hand. She’s young, yet she seems to be well practised in her craft – something she would have learnt as a child and been expected to continue into adulthood.

Her white shirt, with its full sleeves and open neck, catches the evening sun. Her blue bodice is stiff, laced tightly at the front, her full skirts spread to cover her feet. Her hair is smoothed back into a knot behind her head, little tendrils falling onto her pale forehead. Her nose and cheeks are tinted a rosy pink.

Karel Dujardin has set the animals that the young woman tends in a line across the foreground of the picture. The curly fleeces of the sheep have been painted with great detail. One animal gazes out at us with limpid brown eyes, its wool almost honey coloured in the sun. The cows have their backs to us; one lies down, solid but comfortable in the warmth. The other, judging by its size and strength, is most likely a bull, seemingly on watch, staring hard into the distance. Its muscles and sinews are almost undefined in silhouette, but there’s a sense of power suggested by the forward thrust of its head and shoulders and by the upward sweep of the horns.

The picture was painted early in Dujardin’s career, shortly after he returned from a stay in Rome. Other Dutch artists had gathered there to paint the Roman Campagna (the countryside around the city). He had studied with Nicolaes Berchem, one of the leaders of this group (who became known as the Italianates). Their representations of the mountainous Italian landscape littered with classical or ruined buildings and of the soft, golden light of Mediterranean skies were very popular with Dutch collectors.

Dujardin was no exception, but his paintings show a difference from the other artists in the group. Like them – look at Berchem’s Peasants with Cattle fording a Stream or Jan Both’s A Rocky Italian Landscape with Herdsmen and Muleteers – he shows this young woman and the animals against a background of distant mountains and a splendid Italian villa on the hillside. But while he does give a tinge of Italian gold to his sky, the rest is a crisp, clear blue, not common to his peers. It is as if he has used the colour of the sky to bridge the gap between his memory of Italy and the reality of the bright northern light of Amsterdam where he painted this picture.