Landscape with Goats

Now in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pynacker's 1660 'Landscape with Goats' represents a subgenre of pastoral landscape painting in which animals rather than human figures become the primary inhabitants of the Italianate scene. Goats were ideal pastoral animals for Dutch Italianate painters: they were associated with Mediterranean and mountain landscapes, they provided visual variety through their varied postures and white-and-brown colouring, and they signalled the rural economy of southern Europe familiar from pastoral poetry. The Dutch taste for animal-staffed landscapes was reinforced by the popularity of Nicolaes Berchem, whose energetic compositions of cattle and goats in Italian settings became the model for an entire generation of followers. Pynacker's goats tend to be more carefully observed than Berchem's freer interpretations, placed with attention to their spatial relationship to the surrounding terrain rather than treated as simple decorative elements. The Boston collection's holding of this work reflects the important American acquisition of Dutch Golden Age painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Oil on canvas, goats are rendered with individual attention to their colouring — white, brown, black or mixed — using short, directional strokes that follow the direction of the hair. The Italianate landscape surrounding them uses Pynacker's warm golden palette, with the animals' pale coats catching the sunlight against a cooler mid-ground shadow.