A wooded landscape with herdsmen resting and cows watering by a river

Adriaen van de Velde's landscapes show the clear influence of the Italianate landscapes of Nicolaes Berchem and Karel Dujardin, among others. The warm light and the precision in the depiction of the animals in the present lot reflects Houbraken's comment on the artist who, he writes, applied himself 'industriously to drawing and painting cows, oxen, sheep and landscapes. Loaded down with instruments he would go out into the fields everyday...'. The artist worked up a number of these open-air studies into paintings. The cows and sheep in the foreground of this painting, for example, show close affinities with those in his Shepherd couple and their animals resting under a tree by a pond (sold Sotheby's, London, 5 July 2000, lot 300), and the sheep with its head turned away from the viewer and the cow lying down can be linked to a painting by the artist in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. 983; Hofstede de Groot, no. 208).

This painting is likely to have been that sold at Amsterdam, 16 March 1778, described in Hofstede de Groot as a 'Landscape with cows standing and lying down, and several sheep. Further back a herdsman lies on a rock, conversing with another herdsman who stands near' (measuring 26 x 22 in.).