Nicolaes Berchem, 'Peasants with Cattle fording a Stream', about 1670-80

Many Dutch artists went to live in Italy when they were young and brought their idyllic dreams of a warmer, slower, rural lifestyle home to an enthusiastic Dutch public. Nicolaes Berchem was probably one of them, though there is no proof.

Dutch cities were growing fast and people were migrating to them from the country in large numbers. Perhaps they wanted memories of home – or an idealised version of it. Perhaps those who hadn‘t lived outside the town wanted something to dream about – escape to the country. Living in Haarlem and then in Amsterdam, Berchem produced work that became immensely popular in his time. His paintings and etchings fetched high prices and were widely copied or imitated.

Although Berchem often made paintings taken from drawings and prints, we don’t know if he was working from scenes he had experienced in Italy himself or not. The derelict castle above the river in the painting appears to be imaginary rather than taken from life or from sketches – unlike the slow patient cows with their elegant curved horns, painted in warm browns and glowing whites, lifting soft eyes to look out at us. Berchem has the ability to hold them still but give the feeling that if you looked away for a moment they would have meandered on to catch up to the cowherd, already through the water and trudging off into the distance.

Above all, the picture evokes sound – not just the occasional moo from a cow, but the sudden creak as it moves, the whisk of a tail, the swish of hooves in the gurgling water of the stream, the bleat of a sheep or the shaggy-haired goat. The sunlight is beginning to fade to a cooler evening; leaves rustle, the cowherd gives a call or a whistle that echoes under the cliff and high, high above, almost too small to see, birds call as they circle against the clouds.

And the women, strong and statuesque, wade through the water chatting and pointing the way. One balances a shining water jug on her head, the other hoists a sheep under her arm as if it weighs nothing. Berchem gives them a kind of nobility in their strength, freshness and serenity. They seem far from the life and conditions of a real peasant of the time, epitomised by the ragged man shuffling along close behind with his stick and his basket of unsold vegetables. He paints the low sun catching the women’s sturdy calves and powerful arms, with touches of brilliant white in long, thick hair, on pushed-up sleeves and on the lowered neck of the dog, drooping along behind them.

Such a picture, known as a cabinet picture, was highly sought after. It would have hung in one of the smaller rooms of the large house of a merchant or aristocrat. Other similar, small paintings would hang around it, perhaps of the countryside but also small portraits or indoor scenes and, in religious homes, perhaps biblical scenes – a whole world in miniature.