Peasant Girl Milking a Cow

The museum keeps the title in two languages — Bondflicka mjölkande en ko in Swedish and Peasant Girl Milking a Cow in English — and its own account describes a peasant girl kneeling to milk a cow, with a shepherd boy leaning on his staff at her side. It notes that the subject had a long tradition in Netherlandish art, and reads the picture’s refined naturalism, its subdued atmosphere and its sensitive rendering of space and light as closer to the idyllic landscapes of the pastoral.

The painting was made about 1657–1659 and measures 66 × 59 cm; it was transferred to the collection in 1865 from the Royal Museum, and hangs in the museum’s 17th-century rooms.

Karel Dujardin (1626–1678) was born in Amsterdam and worked in Italy, in The Hague and in Amsterdam; he died in Venice in 1678. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.