Animaux au pâturage

Under a lowering, sun-warmed sky a white goat stands at the centre of a pasture, its head turned back toward the viewer, while sheep rest on the dark grass around it. The scene is a characteristic pastoral by Nicolaes Berchem, the most popular of the Dutch Italianate painters: herds and their keepers set in a golden, southern-seeming landscape were his signature subject, and his pastorals were prized across Europe in his own day and collected well into the eighteenth century. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.