Karel Dujardin - A Woman and a Boy with Animals at a Ford [1657]

Karel Dujardin - A Woman and a Boy with Animals at a Ford [1657], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The peasants, a bare-breasted young woman and a boy, who is shown urinating in the water beside her, have halted at the ford in the heat of the day. The cow faces towards the road leading to the ford, while the mule stoops to drink. The grouping of the figures is echoed in the structure of the rocky embankment in the background, which forms a solid mass to the left, with a sunlit outcrop immediately over the heads of the figures. The woman and mule also appear, in reverse, in an undated etching by the artist. Fords became a popular subject with Italianate landscape painters in Holland. Scenes such as this are evocations of the Roman Campagna, which Dujardin sketched during his stay in Italy.

Dujardin was probably born in Amsterdam, the son of a little-known painter, Guilliam du Gardin. According to his biographer Houbraken, he trained with Berchem; he later visited Rome. In the early 1650s he is recorded in Amsterdam and in 1656 in The Hague. By 1659 he had apparently returned to Amsterdam. He visited Italy again in 1675, and he died in Venice three years later.

[Oil on canvas, 37.7 x 43.5 cm]