Landscape with Milkmaids and Cows
Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)
After 1616
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The “Landscape with Milkmaids and Cows”, which is dated to after 1616, was long held to be the first autonomous landscape painting in Peter Paul Rubens's oeuvre. It belongs to a group of pictures which originally all had the same dimensions and which hung in Rubens's house in Antwerp. At some later point, extra sections were added to the painting, additions that remained undetected and which obscured the circumstance of its belonging to this group of landscapes. Rubens painted numerous landscapes on his own initiative, free from the constraints imposed by his patrons. They remained in his possession to the end of his life. This oil sketch shows everyday activities taking place around a small pool, with three cows at the right-hand edge of the picture and two peasant women fetching water. A drawing preserved at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, evidently a copy of a lost original, shows a topographically identical situation. However, Rubens's oil sketch gives a more idealised impression with additional features. He probably had Italian models in mind, as he possessed a woodcut executed after Titian's “Landscape with a Milkmaid.”
- Material/technique
- oil on panel, cradled
- Measurements
- 76 × 107 cm
- Acquisition
- acquired in 1880 by Prince Johann II von Liechtenstein
- Artists/makers/authors
- Sir Peter Paul Rubens
- Inventory number
- GE 412
- Signature/inscriptions content only available in German
- Siegel: rückw. unidentifiz. blaues Siegel mit fünfzackiger Krone sowie unidentifiziertes rotes Siegel mit Krone und zwei Vögeln
- Provenance
- acquired in 1880 by Prince Johann II von Liechtenstein.
- Iconography
- Forest Landscape
