This large landscape is a remarkably beautiful example within Nicolaes Berchem’s extensive oeuvre. With its richly saturated palette and the brilliant play of light, the painting reflects the Dutch artist’s full embrace of the Italianate style. At the center of this verdant and mountainous landscape are several figures and animals approaching a gentle stream and bathed in the warmth of the early morning sun. A single shepherd plays the flute as three young women sing along. One sits atop a harnessed mule, one carries a lamb in her arms, and one peers in over the shoulder of the shepherd. Other animals surround them, including an ox, a donkey carrying three calves, and several sheep. In the distance, one herdsman directs two of the oxen who have fallen behind. While the background is also wonderfully rendered, here, Berchem seems to draw attention to the figures, as well as to the grandeur of bucolic life.

The son of the renowned still life painter, Pieter Claesz., Berchem was apprenticed at a young age to Jan van Goyen and later worked with Claes Moyaert, Pieter de Grebber and Jan Wils. He married Catrijne Claes de Groot, the daughter of Jan Baptiste Weenix, in 1646, and in his father-in-law, found a true mentor and source of artistic inspiration. He travelled to Westphalia with Jacob van Ruisdael around 1650 and may also have gone to Italy shortly after that trip, although there is little evidence to help verify this other than the stylistic development of his landscape paintings with their warmer tones and rich light. Popular with patrons and collects ors during his own t.mes , Berchem also influenced a younger generation of artists: counted among his pupils are Karel Dujardin, Jacob Ochtervelt and Pieter de Hooch.

By 1817, this painting formed part of the renowned Sierstorpff collects ion at Schloss Driburg, recorded in that year in the collects ion of Count Caspar Heinrich von Siestorpff (1750-1842). According to the Count, he acquired this painting in Cologne and it once formed part of the collects ion of his great-uncle Peter Joseph von Franken-Siersdorf, Bishop of Antwerp, from whom the Count inherited Frans Francken the Younger’s Allegory of Man’s Choice,¹ among several masterpieces. The painting was sold in the Sierstorpff sale in Berlin in 1887, and it later passed into the collects ion of the Counts of Minnigerode, in whose collects ion it remained until after the war.²

1. Sale Dorotheum, Vienna, 21 April 2010, lot 5, for $9,424,640. Another painting in that collects ion was Jan de Beer's Annunciation, which sold at Christie's New York on 28 October 2019, lot 708.

2. An inscription on the reverse of the canvas notes that the work was rescued after the war by Frhr. von Minnigerode-Anglitte.