Landscape with Cattle

Landscape with Cattle

Landscape with Cattle
Artist:Jacob van Strij (Dutch, Dordrecht 1756–1815 Dordrecht)
Date:probably ca. 1800
Medium:Oil on wood
Dimensions:31 1/2 x 42 1/4 in. (80 x 107.3 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1890
Accession Number:91.26.8

This impressive panel bears the signature of Aelbert Cuyp, and until recently was never doubted as his work. Cuyp's paintings were widely appreciated in the eighteenth century, and attracted a number of imitators. The most capable of them, Jacob van Strij, is very probably the author of this picture. Among the qualities that indicate an eighteenth-century painter are the impasto treatment of the clouds, the simplified highlights, the saturated greens and blues, and a tendency to render details as picturesque accents. Several motifs are repeated from paintings by Cuyp. The right background, for example, is derived from the so-called Salmon Fishing in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Catalogue Entry
Until the early 1980s, this picture was generally considered to be by Aelbert Cuyp, although there was effectively no serious discussion of the work in earlier decades. The first person to doubt the attribution was evidently the Dutch landscape specialist Wolfgang Stechow (1954, verbal opinion recorded in departmental archives) who rejected Cuyp's authorship and suggested an attribution to Jacob van Strij. This attribution was adopted by The Met in 1984 at Walter Liedtke’s suggestion, which reflected the opinion of scholarly visitors (see Liedtke 2007) and his own study of indisputable Van Strijs in various collections.
The styles of Jacob van Strij and his brother Abraham have become much better known in the past twenty years—especially through an exhibition at Dordrecht and Enschede in 2000—and The Met’s painting has attracted scholarly attention. Comparisons with signed works by Jacob van Strij leave no room for doubt that the New York panel was painted by him. There are four signed pastoral landscapes by Van Strij (all on wood) in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and one signed panel, Resting Cows by a River, in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum. At least one of the landscapes by Van Strij in the Dordrechts Museum is comparable, although a signed canvas, Landscape with Horseman and Cattle, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is more analogous in composition as well as execution. A number of similar works by Van Strij have been seen at auction in recent years. One of the most relevant (A River Landscape with Cattle and a Herdsman Conversing with a Girl; art market, New York, 1989), since it includes the same group of cows and boy lying in the grass as are found in The Met's painting, is unfortunately unsigned but is typical of the artist. Van Strij used the same cows and resting boy in a panel in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, which was also formerly considered to be by Cuyp.
Qualities characteristic of Van Strij in The Met’s picture are the saturated colors (especially the green of the grass), the dense application of paint throughout, the impasto highlights and isolated suggestions of texture in the cattle, and the pasty and rather decorative handling of the clouds. The painter set up a repoussoir of branches, twigs, and grass across the entire foreground, with V-shaped marks, ticks, and dots suggesting highlights on foliage, but with no sense of actual plant forms. In similar areas, Cuyp himself also reveals an artistic touch, but takes pains to describe vegetation convincingly. The lighting on his animals, whether cows or horses, models form and at the same time conveys the sense of daylight bathing the entire scene. The greens of his grass are subtle and translucent, giving the impression, as in the distance and in the sky, that atmospheric perspective transforms the appearance of everything. Van Strij achieved Cuyp-like effects with very different means, which are always denser, flatter, and often fussier, revealing an eighteenth-century master's sensibility, which especially in Holland contrasts with the descriptive preoccupation of earlier painters in allowing the artist's materials to speak for themselves.
As has often been noted, the right background of The Met’s picture derives from the right half of Cuyp's Equestrian Portrait of Pieter de Roovere ("Salmon Fishing"), of about 1650 (Koninklyk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, The Hague). The two houses in that painting, the sailboat, the fishermen with a net, a version of the man leading a horse, and the dog in the foreground were borrowed and slightly rearranged into a more compact vignette. Precisely the same arrangement of three standing cows seen in profile is found in a panel by Cuyp, A Herdsman Seated on a Hillock with Six Cows Nearby, of about 1650 (art market, 1997). Furthermore, six of the eight cows in Cuyp's River Landscape with Cows, of about 1648–50 (National Gallery of Art, Washington), correspond approximately with cows in the New York painting, although their positions differ somewhat, and Van Strij has introduced a reclining cow seen directly from the back (similar cows occur elsewhere in Cuyp's oeuvre).
The tower in the left background is based on the ruined Huis te Merwede, which still stands by the river Merwede on the northeast side of Dordrecht. Cuyp included the castle in a number of works. The sleeping boy is also borrowed from one or another painting by Cuyp, for example, A Distant View of Dordrecht, with a Sleeping Herdsman and Five Cows ("The Small Dart"), of about 1650 (National Gallery, London). Drawings with a similar figure by Van Strij are known.
Jacob van Strij's authorship of The Met's painting and its relationship to one or more paintings by Cuyp appear to have been recorded in the 1816 sale catalogue of pictures from the artist's own estate and from the collection of Pieter van den Santheuvel van Driel, of Dordrecht (see Provenance). Number 101 in that auction, which took place in Dordrecht on April 24, is described as "the same [J. van Strij], after the same [A. Cuip]," meaning that the preceding lot was also a copy or pastiche by Van Strij after Cuyp. The support is given as panel, and the measurements as 31 duimen high by 40 1/2 duimen wide, which is very nearly the same size as The Met’s panel. Broos (2004) concludes that they are the same work. It is not certain which paintings in the sale came from Van Strij's estate and which from Van den Santheuvel van Driel's collection, but the title page of the sale catalogue explains that the pictures are "partly" from the latter "but largely" from Van Strij, who was also the painter of a large number of works in the auction.
Many works by Cuyp were still in Dordrecht collections when Van Strij painted this picture, probably about 1800. The Equestrian Portrait of Pieter de Roovere was at the time in the Dordrecht residence of Jonkheer Ocker Repelaer, Lord of Driel (1759–1832). Drawings by Cuyp must have been accessible as well; in 1767, more than eighty were sold at auction in Dordrecht.
A replica of The Met's picture, most likely also by Van Strij, was on the art market in Salzburg in 1951.
[2016; adapted from Liedtke 2007]

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