Adriaen van de Velde, 'A Landscape with a Farm by a Stream', 1661

Adriaen van de Velde’s tranquil views made him one of the most successful Dutch landscape artists of his time. In this picture, the low horizon and high viewpoint give the impression of a vast distance ending in a range of low, misty hills. These hills are, like the rest of the scene, entirely imaginary. The river winds its way – seemingly from beneath our feet – in a hairpin curve past the cow with its calf, leading our eye towards the farm building and away behind the screen of trees on the right.

The wide sky and dramatic cloud formation help to emphasise this sense of distance, while the shifting clouds allow the sun to illuminate the different areas, making the eye dart from one to the other to discover each small vignette and the story it tells. The line of animals asleep in the foreground leads us to the two men in conversation behind them; the intense blue of the standing man’s coat is in harmony with the brilliant blue of the sky. Across the river, a woman tends ducks outside the thatched farmhouse with distinctive arched windows and an open hayloft above them. Away to the left, on the high bank almost opposite us, two men drive a herd of sheep out of the picture, giving the scene movement. Their heads break the line of the horizon, momentarily interrupting the serenity of the scene as they go.

Although the scenery in this – and in the majority of van de Velde’s other landscapes – is imaginary, the figures and the animals are not. The artist left many detailed and sensitive drawings taken from life that he used many times to fill his pictures with incident and atmosphere. There is a preparatory drawing for the cow with the white face in the Amsterdam Museum, for instance, and this same animal appears in other pictures as well.

Adriaen van de Velde sometimes supplied both figures and animals for the landscapes of other artists, a practice that was common and accepted in Holland at the time. He was the younger brother of the maritime artist Willem van de Velde the Younger, and for a time both worked in the studio of their father, Willem van de Velde the Elder. They collaborated in The Shore at Schevenignen – Adriaen painted the figures, coach and horses and Willem the landscape and the boats.