Rocky Landscape with Herdsmen and Cattle

Herdsmen drive cattle through a rocky landscape in this pastoral scene from around 1644 at the National Museum Cardiff. Rosa"s pastoral subjects differ markedly from the idealized Arcadian tradition of Claude Lorrain, presenting rural life as rough, physical work in unforgiving terrain. The Cardiff museum"s Italian paintings include this and other Rosa works that reflect the Welsh gentry"s Grand Tour collecting habits. Rosa's mountain and wilderness landscapes established the vocabulary of the sublime that Romantic painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would claim as their own.

Cattle and herdsmen create a moving group within the rocky landscape, with the animals" forms providing warm, solid masses against the harder geological elements. Rosa renders the cattle with convincing anatomy, their bulk and movement observed from life. The landscape framing is characteristically rugged, with the pastoral activity set against dramatic rock formations and sky. The palette emphasizes earth tones appropriate to both the agricultural subject and the rocky setting.