The Road to Market

A small herd of white and dun cattle is being driven along a sandy country road by a young drover and his dog, the beasts bunched in the warm morning light beneath a sky of broken cloud — the everyday commerce of the farm rendered with the gravity of a history painting. Constant Troyon, the leading animal painter of the Barbizon group, turned seriously to cattle subjects only after a journey through the Netherlands in 1847, where the great seventeenth-century herds of Aelbert Cuyp and Paulus Potter redirected his art; from then on his cattle pictures brought him his greatest Salon successes. He painted this canvas in 1858–59, the final, celebrated phase of his career. It was in the Paris collection of E. Gaillard by 1867, was sold as La Route du marché from the Narischkine collection at Galerie Georges Petit in 1883, passed to the dealer Arnold & Tripp, and then to Henry Field of Chicago; his widow established the Henry Field Memorial Collection, through which the painting came to the Art Institute in 1894. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.