Mountainous Landscape with the Ruins of a Castle

Aelbert Cuyp, the leading painter of Dordrecht, was the chief channel through which the Italianate landscape entered Dutch painting, and the golden light of his mature work was later prized by English collectors above almost any other Dutch painter. This panel belongs to the beginning of that development, painted in the early 1640s when Cuyp was still working closely after Jan Both, who had lately returned from Italy, and it takes a hilly southern country rather than the flat river land of his native Holland. The museum’s own description records two horsemen in the left foreground and, further back, a cattle herder and a shepherd with their herds on a road that runs past the ruin of a castle. The painting is held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.