Peasants with Four Oxen and a Goat at a Ford by a Ruined Aqueduct

The ruin is Roman and the evening light is southern, yet the cattle are Dutch. That is how the National Gallery reads this panel, which Berchem probably painted in the later 1650s. The broken arch of an aqueduct, hung with weeds and trailing plants, towers over a shallow ford. Below it Berchem fanned out the cows so that each shows a different side, well-fed animals of the kind a Dutch farmer prized. The people belong to Italy. A young woman rides high on a laden donkey, her billowing skirt the only red in the picture. Beside her walks a man in a wide hat against the sun, and a barelegged youth wades through the stream carrying a heavy load, his dog beside him. The Gallery bought the panel in 1871 with the collection of the late prime minister Sir Robert Peel.