Flusslandschaft mit Reitern

Cuyp never set foot in Italy, yet the whole scene glows with the warm evening light of the south. He caught the idea secondhand, around 1650, from Dutch painters like Jan Both who had come home from Rome a few years before, and he laid that golden haze over country he actually knew. The two horsemen watering their mounts are Dutch officers, and the river is the Waal, near Nijmegen, where Cuyp made drawings before carrying them back to his workshop in Dordrecht. Cattle rest by the bank and the far distance dissolves in light. He worked in his father's trade in a quiet river town and, as far as the records show, barely travelled beyond it.