A cattle market by a canal on the outskirts of town

At a time in which the majority of Dutch painters specialized in a singular genre of painting, Cornelis Saftleven stands out for his remarkable versatility as an artist. While his early biographer Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) described him exclusively as a painter of peasant scenes, guard-rooms, and rural interiors – the subjects that account for the greatest number of his works – he also produced portraits, Biblical and mythological subjects, landscapes with cattle, and roughly a dozen cattle markets. Of this last group, the present painting is a particularly fine example in which Saftleven demonstrates not only his supreme abilities at rendering individual animals but integrates them into a compelling, light-filled composition that recedes diagonally into the distance.

For much of the twentieth century, this painting was attributed to Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691). As Arthur Wheelock has pointed out, Cuyp’s early paintings of the 1630s are so close to those of Cornelis’s younger brother, Herman (1609-1685), with whom Cornelis often collaborated, that the three artists must have been in contact with one another (A. Wheelock, ‘Aelbert Cuyp and the Depiction of the Dutch Arcadia’, in Aelbert Cuyp, A. Wheelock, ed., New York, 2001, p. 26). The crisply defined forms created by passages of brilliant white set against muted earth tones in the present painting are, in turn, largely indebted to the contre-jour light effects that Cuyp increasingly developed in his paintings of the 1640s, culminating in works such as the Travelers in Hilly Countryside (Cleveland Museum of Art).

This painting, which was unknown to Wolfgang Schulz at the time of his catalogue raisonné, can probably be associated with a cattle market with quack doctor that Schulz knew only from the 1777 sale of the collection of Jean-Pierre Alexandre Gérard de Bruny de La Tour d’Aigues (1739-1777) (loc. cit.). La Tour d’Aigues was an officer in the French Guards and amateur artist who studied under both François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734-1781) and produced works in the manner of Salomon van Ruysdael (1600/03-1670) and Isack van Ostade (1621-1649) (C. Blanc, Le trésor de la curiosité, I, Paris, 1857, p. 401). The present painting’s dimensions correspond to those given in the sale catalogue, and, crucially, the figure that stands head-and-shoulders above the others in the background wears a plumed hat, a detail that often appears in contemporary images of charlatans (fig. 1).