Support The panel consists of two horizontally grained oak planks (17 and 26 cm), approx. 0.8 cm thick. The bottom edge has probably been trimmed slightly. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1622. The panel could have been ready for use by 1633, but a date in or after 1639 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends partially over the edges of the support at the top and on the left and right, but not over the bottom edge. It consists of somewhat transparent, coarse white and a few small orange pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends partially over the edges of the support at the top and on the left and right, but not over the bottom edge. The composition was built up from the back to the front (with a few exceptions) in no more than two layers, leaving the cows in reserve. A dark paint, possibly part of an undermodelling, is clearly visible with infrared photography, and also with the naked eye, adjacent to the cow on the left, where an earlier version of its legs shows through. Some of the lighter parts of the sky were applied over the cows to adjust their contours and make the animals stand out from the background. Several small highlights and details were added to them in the final stage. The grass in the foreground, the tree to the right, the bushes in the middle ground and those at the horizon were all placed on top of the sky and the water. The paint was loosely applied wet in wet, in many places with a stiff brush or with the top of a brush, which caused the underlying paint to be pushed away in a few spots. The paint layers are generally smooth, with some texture in the lighter, thicker parts.
Willem de Ridder, 2022

Fair. The open join, and a crack running across the entire width of the panel at approx. 7 cm from the top, have been reinforced with wooden blocks. Just below the join there is a smaller horizontal crack approx. 39 cm long. At some point a new piece of wood was inserted into the damaged bottom left corner. The increased transparency of the paint layer has added to the visibility of the underlying dark paint in places. Throughout there are small areas with slightly raised but stable paint running parallel to the grain of the wood. There are many retouchings, especially in the sky and in the dark areas in and around the cows. The varnish has turned matte here and there in retouched areas, and has yellowed severely.

…; collection William Evans (1807-1881), Crumpsall Grange, Lancaster, first half of the 19th century;¹¹According to the dealer E. Speelman in a letter of 17 March 1959 to the museum, RMA Archive; [A. van Schendel], Catalogue of Paintings Rijksmuseum Amsterdam_coll. cat. 1960, p. 80. by descent to his grandson, Murland de Grasse Evans (1874-1946), 2nd Baronet of Tubbendeny;²²According to the dealer E. Speelman in a letter of 17 March 1959 to the museum, RMA Archive; [A. van Schendel], Catalogue of Paintings Rijksmuseum Amsterdam_coll. cat. 1960, p. 80; A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, p. 461.…; from the dealer E. Speelman, London, £12,500, to the museum, with the support of the Jubileumfonds, 1959

Object number: SK-A-3957

Credit line: Purchased with the support of N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken to Stichting Jubileumfonds Rijksmuseum

Many of Aelbert Cuyp’s pictures ended up in English collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them the present one, which was the first to be repatriated to the Netherlands in 1959. It was not a top-notch work, though. There are numerous retouchings in the sky and the abraded cows, and several large areas of paint loss had been filled in.

According to Chong it is an early-nineteenth-century pastiche that is loosely based on a series of original river landscapes.⁸⁸A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, p. 461, no. C43. All of them show a group of cows by the water’s edge seen from a low vantage point. A few are standing in the river and are reflected in its almost smooth surface, while the background is coloured by the soft golden light of the evening sun. Interestingly, there is always one animal that has split off from the rest and waded out further into the river. The earliest of these pictures appears to be A Herdsman with Five Cows by a River in London;⁹⁹The National Gallery; illustrated in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, p. 133. there are some boats on the water and the herdsman is crouched down on the bank. These elements have been shifted to the background or are missing from the other scenes.¹⁰¹⁰The most important of those other works are Cows in a River and Bulls on a Riverbank, private collection; illustrated in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, pp. 139-40. As well as Cattle in a River, Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts; illustrated in P.C. Sutton et al., Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 1987-88, pl. 67. There is no consensus on the dating of this group of paintings. It is generally assumed that they were made around 1650, but some scholars have placed them in the mid-1640s and others as late as the mid-1650s.¹¹¹¹On the dating see Chong in P.C. Sutton et al., Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 1987-88, pp. 293-95; Chong in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, p. 132. More recently Kloek confirmed an origin in the mid-1640s and emphasized that if the work is indeed by Cuyp, it must be one of his first of cows by the waterside.¹²¹²M. Bijl and W.T. Kloek, ‘A Painting Re-attributed to Aelbert Cuyp: Connoisseurship and Technical Research’, The Burlington Magazine 156 (2014), pp. 91-98, esp. p. 97.

The Rijksmuseum picture displays obvious similarities to this series of landscapes, but that does not make it a pastiche. More than that, there is clear evidence of Cuyp’s hand in the soft golden glow in the background, the loosely brushed cows and the naturalistic composition. The dendrochronology shows that the panel was most probably ready for use by 1639,¹³¹³See Technical notes. which makes it unlikely that this is a nineteenth-century painting. Compositionally it is not as mature as the Budapest Cattle in a River, for example.¹⁴¹⁴Museum of Fine Arts; illustrated in P.C. Sutton et al., Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Boston (Museum of Fine Arts)/Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 1987-88, pl. 67. The grouping of the cows on the right is clumsy, and it is hard to distinguish the individual animals from one another. Cuyp was obviously still searching for the best way of creating a balanced scene. It appears to be one of the earliest works in the series, and is closest to A Herdsman with Five Cows by a River in London, so a date just before 1650 would be the most plausible.¹⁵¹⁵W.T. Kloek, Aelbert Cuyp: Land, Water, Light, Amsterdam 2002, p. 22, assigns it to the mid-1640s. That is not inconceivable, but would mean dating the other paintings in the group earlier as well.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

J. Offerhaus, ‘Aelbert Cuyp, Koeien aan de waterkant’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 7 (1959), pp. 60-61; A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, p. 461, no. C43 (as ‘a late pastiche, perhaps early 19th-century’); W.T. Kloek, Aelbert Cuyp: Land, Water, Light, Amsterdam 2002, p. 22

1960, p. 80, no. 748 A4; 1976, p. 184, no. A 3957

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'Aelbert Cuyp, River Landscape with Cows, c. 1645 - c. 1650', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20027732