Adriaen van de Velde, 'Animals near a Building', 1663

Adriaen van de Velde’s pastoral scenes are, like this one, almost always tranquil and serene; the animals he portrayed are well tended and the surroundings pleasing. Buildings are old, often perhaps a little ramshackle, but clean and tidy, and seeming to hold a sense of history.

These were pictures designed to be easy to live with, and to give a city dweller a sense of being in touch with the countryside and traditional life. In this they were successful and so was van de Velde in his time. But although the paintings are tranquil there’s a sense of energy and movement hidden within them, and it’s a key part of their appeal.

In this picture, the bay horse is placed centrally, statuesque and seemingly unmoving, but the strong, swooping line of its back against the skyline dominates the picture and hints at the animal’s power. The line leads the eye past its feathery mane ruffled In the wind, and up to the fast moving clouds overhead. One of them catches the sun as it edges between the darker clouds that move away on either side of it to make way for the sparkling blue of the sky. Trees rustle in the wind on the right, and on the left, loose tiles and a chimney pot break the sharp diagonal silhouette of the roof of the house. The cow and the goat may be static, but van de Velde has made the light play over them in such a way that they appear to be about to move – a shift of the head, the flick of a tail. Water flows from a pipe, almost hidden in the shadows behind the cow, making a small torrent that adds to the life and freshness of the picture.

Although he died young, van de Velde left a large number of paintings as well as many elegant, sensitive drawings, mostly in red chalk. He would put many of the figures and animals that he had drawn into his paintings, using them several times over. The cow in this painting appears in The Migration of Jacob (Wallace Collection, London) and the goat also appears in A Goat and a Kid.

Adriaen Van de Velde was the younger brother of the marine artist Willem van de Velde the Younger. They worked together in the studio of their father, Willem van de Velde the Elder, also a marine artist. Adriaen chose to become a landscape artist rather than concentrate on seascapes like his brother, though he sometimes provided the figures and animals in Willem’s pictures, notably in The Shore at Scheveningen. Sharing the making of a painting in this way was common practice in seventeenth-century Holland.