Aelbert Cuyp

Aelbert Cuyp painted his home town of Dordrecht as if it lay under an Italian sun. He worked in that quiet Dutch river city through the 17th century, and his best pictures bathe cows, horsemen and broad estuaries in a warm, low, golden light, the kind of glow you get at the very start or end of a day.

The strange thing is that he almost certainly never went to Italy. He learned that honeyed Mediterranean light second-hand, from other Dutch painters who had made the trip, and applied it to the flat, watery landscape of home, standing his cattle against the shining river like patient monuments.

Cuyp married a wealthy widow in his 40s, grew prosperous and respectable, and more or less stopped painting to serve on church and city boards. His work was half-forgotten until the 18th and 19th centuries, when English collectors fell in love with those golden riverscapes and carried so many off to Britain that some of his finest paintings hang in London today.