Pastoral Landscape with Ruins

By 1664 Adriaen van de Velde had made the sunlit pastoral the specialty of the Dutch Golden Age landscape, infusing the native idiom of dunes, cattle and cloud with an Italianate clarity of light. Here a shepherd rests his flock before a ruined arcade whose classical arches have grown into the meadow, the melon-tinted sky catching the last warmth of a long afternoon. Van de Velde’s figures were so prized that his colleagues — Wouwerman and Hobbema among them — borrowed them to animate their own fields, but this canvas shows him at full ease in both landscape and staffage, making of a broken antiquity and a few grazing beasts a scene of unforced harmony. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.