Orpheus Charming the Animals

Around 1640, when Aelbert Cuyp was about 20, Dutch trading voyages were bringing home descriptions, pictures and now and then live specimens of animals from Asia, Africa and the Americas. In this early canvas he took an old story told by the Roman poet Ovid, about Orpheus, the singer of Greek myth who could calm wild beasts with his music, and gave him an audience drawn from that widening world. The setting is a Dutch landscape with bulls, goats and cats, and among them stand jaguars, a camel, an elephant and an ostrich. The museum thinks Cuyp probably saw some of these creatures alive and studied others from prints and books. An Asian elephant called Hansken was being shown around Dutch towns in those same years, and Rembrandt drew her in 1637. The museum also reads a political point into the picture, with Orpheus's power over the animals standing for the Dutch Republic's reach across the globe. In 1768 the canvas sold at auction in The Hague for 171 guilders, and two years later it fetched 350. It now hangs in Boston as a promised gift from the collectors Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo.