The Herdsmen: Woman Milking a Goat and a Flute Player

The light here is Roman, yet the Louvre places this panel between 1639 and 1642, after Pieter van Laer had left Italy and gone home to Haarlem. He painted it on oak, the usual support in Dutch workshops, as an oval about 43 centimetres wide. A woman crouches to milk a goat, a herdsman sits beside her with his flute, a long-horned ox raises its head, and a dog lies near the water, all under warm cliffs and a wide pale sky. Herdsmen and cattle in a golden southern countryside became a favourite subject of the next generation of Dutch painters of Italian landscape. The panel has a pendant in the Louvre, a departure from an inn of the same size and shape. The pair belonged to a burgomaster of The Hague, whose collection was sold in 1737, and later to the duc de Brissac. In 1794 the revolutionary authorities seized them from his daughter, the duchesse de Mortemart, who had emigrated, and three years later they entered the Louvre.