Arcadian Landscape with Fishermen

In 1707 Gerard de Lairesse, a Liège-born painter who worked in Amsterdam, published his Groot Schilderboek, a large handbook for artists. In it he ranked the antique landscape, with its temples, tombs and shepherds, above views of the ordinary Dutch countryside. Such scenes found buyers in Amsterdam in the decades that followed, and Jan van Huysum painted a number of them alongside his flowers.

Here the ideal is set out piece by piece. Fishermen work at the edge of a lake in the foreground, classical temples rise on the right, and further back a town or a temple complex fills the distance. On the left a shepherd drives his flock. Van Huysum signed the picture on a rock at the lower left, Jan Van Huysum fecit.