Oil on canvas, 'Woman Milking an Ewe', style of Nicolaes Berchem, 19th century

A woman milking a ewe in a flat landscape bathed in a golden sunlight, a kid resting at her feet.

Bequeathed by John M. Parsons

Bequeathed by John M. Parsons, 1870
John Meeson Parsons (1798-1870), art collector, was born in Newport, Shropshire. He later settled in London, and became a member of the stock exchange. His interest in railways led to his election as an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1839, and he was director or chairman of two railway companies between 1843 and 1848. Much of his time however was spent collecting pictures and works of art. In his will he offered his collection of mostly German and Dutch schools to the National Gallery (which selected only three works) and to the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington, later the Victoria and Albert Museum. The South Kensington Museum acquired ninety-two oil paintings and forty-seven watercolours. A number of engravings were also left to the British Museum.

Historical significance: This painting is a 19th century pastiche, i.e an image that self-consciously borrows its style, technique or motifs from other works of art and yet is not a direct copy, of a painting by Berchem (whereabouts unknown) engraved by Johannes Visscher (The Illustrated Bartsch, Netherlandish artists, vol. 7 formerly vol. 5 part II, no. 104). It is also a typical imitation of late Berchem's production when he employed a warm and golden palette as opposed to a cooler colour scheme of his early and mature paintings. A painting in Amsterdam Historisch Museum, Italian landscape, ca. 1670, and another in the Norton Simon Foundation, Pastoral scene, 1679, present the same type of pastoral scenes in an identical golden palette. Although set in an imaginary landscape, these paintings are reminiscent of Italy and display an ideal world where peasants and animals live in peace and harmony.
In the early 19th century there was still a market for this kind of pictures until Impressionism renewed the tradition of landscape paintings. Nicolaes Berchem had many followers and also influenced artists outside the Netherlands. The French Rococo painter, François Boucher, owned some of his pictures in the mid-18th century and he inspired such prominent artists as Francesco Zuccarelli, Marco Ricci and maybe even Antoine Watteau.
The 19th-century characteristic of this painting can be found in the sharper execution of the figures and the flat rendering of the modelling.

Italianate landscapes were particularly praised during the 17th century up to the early 19th century. The term conventionally refers to the school of Dutch painters and draughtsmen who were active in Rome for more than a hundred years, starting from the early 17th century. These artists produced mainly pastoral subjects bathed in warm southern light, set in an Italian, or specifically Roman, landscape. The term is also often applied, but wrongly, to artists who never left the northern Netherlands but who worked primarily in an Italianate style. Eighteenth-century collectors, especially French ones, preferred a view by Berchem or Both to a scene of the Dutch country side by Jacob van Ruisdael for instance. The taste for the Italianates continued undiminished into the 19th century. An early voice denouncing these artists was that of John Constable in 1836 and at the end of the century Italianates had lost favour oartly because of the rise of Impressionism and the appreciation of the Dutch national school of landscape expounded by such eminent critics as Wilhem von Bode, E.W. Moes and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot.

19th century painting in the manner of Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683)

Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683) may have trained in Haarlem with Jan van Goyen. He was a prolific painter (about 850 paintings), draughtsman and etcher. He joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1642. From the mid-1650s until his death, Berchem shuttled back and forth between Haarlem and Amsterdam where he died in 1683.

This painting is an imitation of Nicolaes Berchem's style, in which imaginary Italianate landscapes usually present a recreation of the Italian countryside after sketches drawn from life. A prolific painter (about 850 paintings), draughtsman and etcher, he was already very well known during his lifetime and the taste for his Italianate landscape continued undiminished into the 19th century.

556-1870