Landscape with Grazing Cattle

When Joseph Roos signed this panel in 1766, Dresden was still repairing the damage of the Seven Years' War. In July 1760 Prussian artillery had bombarded the Saxon capital, and in 1764 a new Academy of Arts was founded in the city. Roos had just been made its professor of landscape painting. None of that reaches the picture. A young woman in a red skirt sits beside a shepherd stretched out on the ground, goats and sheep rest or graze, a reddish ox lies in the grass, and thatched cottages stand on the slope behind. The Belvedere's curator calls the scene an idyll far removed from real country life. Figures and animals are sharply outlined, while the hills behind them dissolve into soft transitions. The signature and date are at the lower left.