Landscape with Herdsmen
Aelbert Cuyp·mid-1650s
Historical Context
Cuyp's Landscape with Herdsmen from the mid-1650s represents his art at its characteristic peak — the golden evening light that he had developed from the Utrecht Italianates' translation of Claude Lorrain's Roman light into Dutch pastoral terms, suffusing herdsmen and cattle in a warm radiance that transformed agricultural labor into Arcadian poetry. By the mid-1650s, Cuyp was one of the most accomplished landscape painters in the Netherlands, though his work remained largely local in its recognition until the eighteenth century when British collectors discovered him and built the enormous English collections that made his name synonymous with a particular quality of golden atmospheric landscape painting.
Technical Analysis
The golden atmospheric light is at its most refined, with warm tones graduated from brilliant sky to luminous distance to more defined foreground. The herdsmen and cattle are rendered with careful observation of form and posture, while the landscape setting achieves the characteristic Cuyp balance between detailed foreground and atmospheric distance.
Provenance
Probably (sale, by J. A. Jolles and H. de Winter, Amsterdam, 23 May 1764, no. 41, bought in). C. Price, London; Frederick Howard, 5th earl of Carlisle [1748-1825], London, and Castle Howard, Yorkshire, by 1771;[1] by descent in the Howard family to George James Howard, 9th earl of Carlisle [1843-1911], London, and Castle Howard; purchased September 1907 by (P. & D. Colnaghi, London), half share with (M. Knoedler & Co., London and New York);[2] sold July 1909 to William Andrews Clark [1839-1925], New York; bequest 1926 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art. [1] According to Alan Chong (“Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1992: 374, 375 n. 1), the painting was sold by Price to Howard in 1771 or shortly before. This information comes from an 1865 inventory in the Castle Howard archives of the Earl of Carlisle’s house on Grosvenor Place in London, in which the painting is listed as number 92. The earl in 1865 would have been the Reverend William George Howard, 8th earl of Carlisle (1808-1889), who succeeded to the title in December of the previous year. [2] The painting is stock number 11463 in the M. Knoedler & Co. Records, accession number 2012.M.54, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: Painting Stockbook 5, 8800-12652, 1899 April -1911 December, p. 149; copy in NGA curatorial files.
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