Nicolaes Berchem, A Man and a Youth ploughing with Oxen

Clouds billow up over a wild, untamed valley. The far side is covered in bushes and scrub. A bare, chalky cliff face catches the sunlight and tips down into a ravine that leads away down a path hidden by the undergrowth. A man strolls there with a dog, both of them portrayed in silhouette by little more than a thin flick of the brush.

On the near side of the valley, a peasant trudges up the steep side of the hill. His plough grinds into the stony earth, bald in places and infertile. His oxen strain at the weight, encouraged by the whip in the hand of a boy wearing rags with an old hat on the back of his head. One beast turns his eyes directly to us.

But there is a rough grandeur in the picture. The oxen are fine animals, well muscled and rich in colour. The peasant himself is strong, windswept and sunburnt. His massive arms labour at the primitive plough; his shirt is shabby, but gleams white and clean in the sun. He leans back in a huge effort to shove the plough forward over the last lip of the hillside, digging in hard to have some effect on the unyielding soil. He is a forerunner of the many images of ‘the heroic peasant’ to come from Jean François Millet, Rosa Bonheur, Van Gogh and many other artists concerned with presenting the world as it was, rather than making the countryside an idealised Italianate myth.

Nicolaes Berchem may have been one of the several Dutch artists who travelled to Italy in the early seventeenth century to paint landscapes in the softer Italian light and take inspiration from the Italian artists of the past who were considered the embodiment of high art. But the light in Berchem’s picture is cooler than that of Rome or Naples, and the towering clouds have a sea-blown feel, more like a scene from a landscape closer to a wilder sea than the Mediterranean. Yet the landscape isn't the familiar flat Dutch coastal view either. These are imaginary hills, or hills taken from a sketchbook that might have been made in Italy or possibly from a print in Berchem’s collection.

A small, atmospheric picture such as this would have been treasured in a collection decorating the panelled walls of a Dutch burgher’s house. The scene would have been admired for itself, but also hints at the fortitude of the Dutch peasants who worked the land of the newly founded Dutch Republic. At the time that Berchem painted his picture, these same peasants were – with monumental effort and grinding labour – creating new stretches of land from the sea through the digging of ditches and dykes.