A Cow, a couple merrymaking beyond

The carefully composed assembly of figures, animals and objects in the present drawing may symbolize the prosperous Dutch economy in the 17th Century. Dutch cattle already enjoyed considerable fame throughout Europe. The flourishing economy, embodied by the prominent cow and the milk-bucket, resulted in a peaceful society, symbolized by the amorous pigeons in the foreground and the couple beyond. Matham's cow can be placed in an iconographic tradition leading back to Lucas van Leyden's famous engraving of a milkmaid dated 1510 (B. 158). Only recently the ambiguous meaning of (the milking of) a cow has been researched, E. de Jongh, G. Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, Genreprints in the Netherlands 1550-1700, exhib. catalogue, Amsterdam, 1997, pp. 260-3.
Matham, father of Adriaen and Theodoor Matham (see also lot 66 in this sale), stepson and pupil of Hendrick Goltzius, was also the brother-in-law of Hendrick de Gheyn II. The present lot recalls De Gheyn's drawing of a milkmaid in the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam (I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn, Three Generations, The Hague Boston London, 1983, no. 950, fig. 249).
Matham's comparable drawing of a monkey smoking after Hendrick Goltzius, in the same technique and with similar symbolical associations, is in the Fondation Custodia, Paris, W. Bernt, Die Niederländischen Zeichner des 17. Jahrhunderts, Munich, 1958, II, no. 389, illustrated.