River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants

By 1764 this big canvas had been bought in the Netherlands for John Stuart, Earl of Bute, a Scottish nobleman and close friend of King George III. Cuyp was then almost unknown in Britain. When an etching of the picture came out that year, the printmaker even called him Adriaen. Soon afterwards the London publisher John Boydell praised it as inexpressibly bright, clear and sunny, and British collectors began buying Cuyp in earnest. The view itself is invented. There are no mountains in Holland, the distant town cannot be identified, and the pale gold light is closer to a southern morning. Almost everything is still. Cows rest by the path, a rider on a white horse turns to a boy, and in the bushes by the water a man crouches with his gun aimed at the birds on the river.