Adriaen van de Velde, 'A Farm with a Dead Tree', 1658

Like many of Adriaen van de Velde’s paintings, this is a quiet picture. The conversation between the milkmaid and the man with the basket seems amicable, with nothing to disturb the rhythmic swish of the milk into the pail. One pig sleeps while another hauls itself up on its haunches, looking as if it will roll over and snooze again in the spring sunshine.

The skeleton of the dead oak tree stands out starkly against the sky, but the clouds are soft and fluffy, moving slowly. To soften the harsh outline further, van de Velde has covered the lower branches with shaggy ivy. High up, an old rook’s nest is balanced, somewhat precariously, in a crook. Beside the tree, the new shoots of a pair of willows fan out softly from elegantly curved trunks. Beneath it, spikes thrust up from the heap of sticks echo the twigs left on the crooked branches. They're likely to have been cut from it as kindling – nothing was left to waste on a well-run seventeenth-century Dutch farm.

Van de Velde painted the picture when he was only 22 years old and it shows remarkable maturity for one so young. The three distinct groups of animals and figures, each a satisfying vignette on its own, are bound together by the wide pool of warm sunlight. The brilliant blue of the milkmaid’s skirt enlivens the mellow browns, creams and greys of the foreground and harmonises with the blue of the sky.

At the time the picture was painted, van de Velde was influenced by the animal painter Paulus Potter, whose images of statuesque cattle, particularly bulls, were popular in Holland. Van de Velde silhouettes the horns on his grey bull, drawing attention to its strength and substance, as Potter does in his Cattle and Sheep in a Stormy Landscape, in which he silhouettes the black bull’s horns against a break in the storm clouds.

In his early career, van de Velde worked in the studio of his father, Willem van de Velde the Elder, alongside his elder brother, Willem van de Velde the Younger – both of them marine artists of great reputation. But Adriaen chose to become a landscape painter rather than follow their path, although he frequently collaborated with his elder brother, painting the figures in some of his works – as he did in The Shore at Scheveningen. This practice of sharing a work was common practice in Holland at the time.