It is exactly a year since the thousandth case was reported in the recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Chosen in the hope of a brighter future for the bovine population, and those whose livelihoods depend on it, this week’s picture is a cattle-farmer’s idyll created by the greatest painter of cows in the history of Western art. Aelbert Cuyp’s River Landscape with Cows, of about 1648-50, shows livestock at rest in the predominantly flat and watery pastureland surrounding the artist’s native town of Dordrecht, in Holland. The picture is owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington but is currently on loan to the National Gallery in London as part of an exhibition dedicated to Cuyp’s work (until 11 May).
Cuyp was not the only seventeenth-century Dutch artist to depict the cow, but he was the first to invest that particular ruminant with such unexpected grandeur. Earlier painters had included cattle in their work, but only as incidental elements in the landscape, usually representing them as rather shambling and inelegant creatures (as indeed a milk-laden cow can be, hobbled as she is by the dangling uddered football between her hindquarters). By contrast Cuyp’s cows and bullocks are noble contemplatives, who do not merely occupy the land but preside magisterially over it. Shown sitting or standing, and mostly in profile, they have been endowed with a powerful air of solemnity. The animal in the middle of this particular group fixes the viewer with a gaze that might almost be described as quizzical.

No painter has ever caught the heaviness and substantiality of prize cattle as Cuyp did. He painted their undulating profiles, thick necks and meatily rippling flanks – thrown into relief by such a dramatically raking effect of contre-jour light, in the case of the brown cow in the right foreground, that the animal seems almost touchable – with the fond and careful attention of one well versed in the finer points of livestock. (Some of these subtleties are hard to see in reproduction.) But there is poetry at work here as well as realism. The cattle have been as carefully grouped by the artist as if he were composing an outdoor sculpture; and it seems that Cuyp did indeed mean them to be seen as monuments, of a kind.

 Most of Cuyp’s paintings of cattle herds around Dordrecht were painted in the years immediately following the signing of the Treaty of Munster in 1648, an event which finally put an end to the Eighty Years War with Spain and officially ratified the birth of the Dutch Republic. An increasingly prosperous Dutch people, freed from the Spanish yoke and enriched by the expansion of their maritime empire, were tempted to believe that Holland had entered a golden age. There was a revival of interest in the pastoral literature of antiquity, harking back to Virgil and Horace and other Latin authors who had written in praise of the simple rustic life. Dutch poets hymned their native landscape as a second Arcadia, a tranquil and fertile paradise offering sustenance to body and soul. Cows were given a prominent place in this new Dutch pastoral literature, their health and numerousness being regarded as a particularly vital element of the rural idyll. This reflected reality. Dairy farming played an important role in the country’s economy, to such an extent that the well-fed herd of cattle became a symbol of national pride. This network of strongly patriotic meanings and associations helps to explain the elevated tone Cuyp imparted to a scene of cattle grazing. These impressively substantial beasts symbolise the bounty of the land: the wellbeing of a nation itself, made flesh.

Not everyone saw mid-seventeenth-century Holland in Cuyp’s golden light. The English poet Andrew Marvell wrote a satire, The Character of Holland, almost exactly contemporary with the painting shown here, offering a rather different perspective: “Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land/…This indigested vomit of the sea / Fell to the Dutch by just propriety / … A daily deluge over them does boil; / The earth and water play at level-coil; / The fish ofttimes the burger dispossessed, / And sat not as a meat but as a guest.” But the Dutch themselves were powerfully aware of the vulnerability of their watery world, and of the sheer amount of human labour that was needed to guarantee its continuing fertility; and this too is reflected in Cuyp’s “cattlescapes”, where the grazing cows are almost always depicted in close proximity to water, as if to remind the viewer of the physical effort, all the damn- and dike-building, that has been necessary to reclaim this land for pasture. Only graft has made this idyll possible. The painter’s Dordrecht patrons would have needed no reminding of this, because their city was especially prone to flooding. Several of the men who collected Cuyp’s work are known to have helped with the financing of local drainage projects, and to have owned land in the many new agricultural polders established during the middle years of the century.