Aelbert Cuyp, 'A Herdsman with Five Cows by a River', about 1650-5

This small, evocative painting shows the work of Aelbert Cuyp at the peak of his maturity as an artist. It’s a picture full of light and reflections, transforming a simple view of a river at evening time into visual harmony.

Light puffy clouds, lit here and there by the evening sun, drift overhead, leaving patches of shimmering water below that carry almost perfect reflections of boats, animals and distant trees. The wide curve of the small boat that carries two fishermen is echoed in the sweeping downward curve of the high sand dune on the right, framing the scene between them. Tucked into the shelter of the dune, a herdsman squats on his haunches and one of his animals turns towards him with an enquiring gaze.

The depth of colour is at its richest in this corner of the picture, giving the cows weight and substance, and a warm graininess to the sand dune behind them. You can almost hear the faint splash of a hoof stamping in the water or the swish of a tail as the evening midges begin to bite. In a country greatly dependent on its cattle for its wealth, Cuyp has brought these magnificent beasts close to us, giving them as much character as – and much more significance than – the people around them. The evening is so still that the man in the central boat a little way off needs oars as well as a sail to propel him. A glint of sunlight catches the curve of the hull, sweeping on up the arc of the sail.

Several Dutch artists who had been to Italy painted landscapes full of the soft light of the Mediterranean. Cuyp was probably the most important of the artists to be influenced by their work. He transferred this distinctive light to his Dutch scenes, giving them the soft radiance we see in this painting, and in the much larger, more ambitious A Distant View of Dordrecht, with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and Other Figures (‘The Large Dort’) and River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants.

English travellers to Holland in the seventeenth century remarked with surprise that butchers, bakers, blacksmiths and cobblers adorned their homes with pictures. John Evelyn, the famous diarist, was surprised at the amount of money that even ‘a common farmer’ paid for a picture. This small painting might once have hung on the walls of a mansion belonging to a wealthy collector, but it also might have been hung in a humbler house – one where its theme would have appealed to the owner in a more personal way.