Landscape with Cattle Driver and Shepherd

A cattle driver on a mule and his wife drive a herd of cows along the road, and at the left a shepherd boy stands with his sheep, all under a sky that turns gold toward the horizon. Jacob van Strij painted it in Dordrecht in the early 1780s, on a panel just over 80 centimetres wide, and signed it at the lower left, J. van Strij ft. The hills and the warm light go back to Aelbert Cuyp, Dordrecht's great 17th-century landscape painter, who had wrapped his Dutch river views in the same golden haze a century earlier. The brighter touches of colour in the clothes are van Strij's own. The Rijksmuseum bought the panel in 1822, seven years after his death.