(Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp)
A pastoral landscape with cattle and a young woman milking a cow,
oil on panel, 37.5 x 54.5 cm, framed

The present panel is a remarkable testament to the working practices of Peter Paul Rubens’s assistants from their master’s models. The four cows on the right in the foreground: the brown cow looking back into the middle distance of the centre of the composition, the black cow lifting its head, the white cow grazing, and the final brown cow being milked on the right by the maid in flowing drapery form a figural quotation from Rubens’s Landscape with cattle in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (inv. no. 322.). This configuration also appears in Rubens’s Landscape with cows and Sportsmen, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (inv. no. 2013), evidencing the re-use of these compositional motifs. Although the naturalism of the present composition is striking, Rubens’s dynamic arrangement of the heads of the cattle, with their muscular necks, may be informed by his studies of bovine antique sculpture, such as the sheet extant in the collection of the British Museum (inv. no. 1970,0919.103) drawn from the Farnese Bull.

As was common practice in Rubens’s workshop, panels were re-used for working-out different compositions. If the panel is turned vertically, in the sky of the present picture there an underpainted composition that does not relate to the present setting. X-rays have also revealed pentimenti in the head of the white cow in the foreground, the position of the head moved down, and a wet-on-wet application of paint for the horns. Thus, although clearly imitating Rubens’s own motifs, the painter of the present panel was far from a simple workshop copyist.