Adriaen van de Velde, 'The Edge of a Wood', 1658

A shepherd sleeps on a bank on the edge of a wood, his dog curled up beside him and his crook laid carefully on the grass. The sun is bright but gives a cool light and seemingly little heat. The sky is cloudless – a crisp, clear blue – and the feathery new leaves of the trees are outlined sharply against it. The wood looks deep, with the suggestion of an overgrown pathway leading away behind the shepherd’s head.

The sheep are beautifully painted. With quick flicks of the brush, Adriaen van de Velde was able to create the sensation that their tight, wiry curls and spindly legs, as well as the fresh, tufty grass they crop, are tangible. His greatest skill was in the depiction of figures and animals. He left many red chalk drawings of sheep, cows, dogs and of human models, all made from life, and he used them regularly in his paintings. His detail is always impeccable. In this picture the standing sheep is advanced in the late spring moult, while others on the ground behind it still have their heavy, shaggy coats. This would suggest that, while sheep shearing had been carried out since medieval times in Holland, these fleeces will peel naturally to be gathered up by hand, rather than being clipped.

Adriaen van de Velde was one of several artists who were successful in providing these peaceful views. This is an early work, painted when van de Velde was influenced by two other major landscape artists – Karel Dujardin and Paulus Potter. They also portrayed scenes with a screen of dark trees behind quietly grazing or resting animals, delicately painted in a pool of sunlight. Figures beside them, equally tranquil, sat idling away their time, or slept like van de Velde’s shepherd (for other examples, see Dujardin’s Farm Animals in the Shade of a Tree, with a Boy and a Sleeping Herdswoman and Potter’s A Landscape with Cows, Sheep and Horses by a Barn).

In seventeenth-century Holland, pictures of rural idylls of this kind were eagerly sought by collectors. These were not just wealthy merchants or the nobility, but middle-class people too. New money meant that they could look on the countryside as a place of leisure and relaxation to be remembered in the middle of a busy urban life. Because the cities were small and rural areas accessible, city dwellers also understood farming, and livestock in particular, as an important source of prosperity for the nation.