Nicolaes Berchem, 'Peasants by a Ruined Aqueduct', probably 1655-60

The evening sun touches the sturdy cattle standing at the foot of the ruins of a Roman archway. The soft light casts shadows on the weather-worn stones, displaying the ruin’s age and former grandeur. Weeds and trailing plants hang from its crumbling stones. The acute angle of the perspective with which the archway is painted makes it tower above the cattle and the people, seeming to rival the distant mountain for its command over the landscape.

The hills behind may have been seen and recorded by Nicolaes Berchem during a possible stay in Italy, but the cows are unmistakably Dutch cows – solid, well-nurtured, productive and highly valued for their vital place in the Dutch economy. Berchem places them in a fan shape, a neat way of presenting us with different views of the animals, revealing his skill in painting their sturdy bodies, their deep, resonant colours and characterful faces.

The peasants, like the scenery, appear more Italian than Dutch. The bare-legged young man, up to his ankles in the stream, heaves a heavy load with his dog beside him, keeping an eye on the cows. He, like the second man in the painting, wears a big shady hat that seems suited to the hot Italian – rather than the weaker Northern – sun. The second man, swathed in a heavy cloak, seems a close relative of the Neapolitan brigands in Salvator Rosa’s paintings. One looks up at the mounted young woman perched high up on her laden donkey; her gesture in response to his gaze is open to interpretation, but her elevated position and fresh, clean garments seem to give her a status superior to his.

Berchem paints the light catching her high forehead, the sleeves of her costume and a cloth on the donkey’s back where she rests a dainty, bare foot. It gives the deep blue of her bodice a rich sheen, but it’s the bright red of her billowing skirt – the one touch of red in the picture – that lifts and enlivens the scene; many years later, the English artists Turner and Constable understood and often used this effect.

Berchem’s work, like that of other Italianate painters – so-called because they had lived in Italy and been influenced by the work of Italian artists, the southern landscape and the remnants of Antiquity – was highly prized by collectors especially in France but also in Britain, throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His paintings could fetch a huge amount until well into the nineteenth century. In the latter half of that century they began to be seen as ‘un-Dutch’ and therefore less interesting. The picture became part of Sir Robert Peel’s large collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings. When the collection was bought for the nation in 1871, the taste for such paintings was perhaps already seen as rather old-fashioned. Italianate landscapes were more widely appreciated after a groundbreaking exhibition held in 1965.