Landscape with Figures and Animals

Nicolaes Berchem made his name painting an Italy of warm afternoon light, shepherds, and cattle wading through streams, all of it sold to buyers in the flat, grey-skied Dutch Republic who wanted a bit of the south on their walls. He was one of the most successful landscape painters of his generation in Holland, rivaled in this sunny Italianate manner only by Jan Both. A scene like this, with small figures driving animals across a hilly setting, is his stock in trade: the foreground busy with goats and drovers, the distance dissolving into golden haze. Berchem was enormously productive and widely copied, and pastorals of this kind hung in Dutch parlors as a daydream of a country many of their owners had never actually seen.