Young lady in a straw hat holding a cockerel and a basket of eggs

Young Lady in a Straw Hat Holding a Cockerel and a Basket of Eggs from 1650 is a distinctive genre portrait by Aelbert Cuyp that combines portraiture with pastoral elements. The straw hat and farmyard accessories create a pastoral persona that may have been a fashionable conceit rather than a record of actual rural life. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays warm amber-golden tonality derived from Jan Both's Italianate landscapes, serene cattle and horse subjects bathed in afternoon light, the Rhine at Dordrecht seen through a Mediterranean filter.

The figure is bathed in Cuyp's warm light, with the straw hat, eggs, and cockerel rendered with the naturalistic precision that characterizes all of his animal and still-life elements.