A peasant girl and boy driving a vegetable cart on a flooded track, with other peasants on their way to market and a boy herding cattle

A leading painter of bucolic landscapes, Jan Siberechts became a member of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke some time between 1648-49, and worked in his native city for nearly a quarter century before settling in England. As with many Dutch and Flemish artists in the seventeenth century, Siberechts was greatly inspired by the Roman campagna and suffused his early landscapes with Italianate light. While it is uncertain whether the artist traveled to Italy himself, he would have seen the work of his contemporaries such as Nicolaes Berchem, Karel Dujardin, and Jan Both and absorbed their observations on light and atmosphere. In the 1660s Siberechts developed his distinctive style of Flemish landscape painting that focus on the idylls of country life.

This painting, dated 1671, depicts a busy scene, focusing on a peasant girl and boy driving a cart laden with vegetables presumably on the way to market. Cows meander down the stream, herded along by a boy with his coat slung over his staff. The cart driver pauses to look over his shoulder at the cowherd and, farther downstream, another woman drives a cart while countryfolk wend their way along the path. Siberechts repeated the motif of figures fording a stream bordered by trees many times, and used this particular compositional structure of the boy and the cart in another painting from 1671, The Farm Cart, now in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin (fig. 1). In The Farm Cart, the boy is looking down at the animals leaning to drink from the stream. This backwards glance from the boy serves to quiet the bustle evident in both paintings, and the stillness of the moment is punctuated only by the horse relieving itself.