A Track on the Edge of a Wood with a Peasant Carrying Sheep (after 1640): Art, History and Details

A Track on the Edge of a Wood with a Peasant Carrying Sheep (after 1640) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Anthonie Waterloo (Dutch, 1609/10–1690).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Known exclusively for his drawings and prints, the Dutch artist Anthonie Waterloo specialized in tree studies and dense forest scenes such as this drawing. The vista here was probably made when he visited the Veluwe region of the Netherlands, in the southern province of Gelderland along the Rhine, in the 1640s. The landscape there was known for its woodlands, heathland, panoramic views, and sand drift, producing vistas drastically different than those of the flat, northwestern Netherlandish provinces. Waterloo's technique of using wet charcoal over dry chalk produced the effect of shimmering light and movement across the complex group of trees that are the feature of the drawing. Waterloo made and sold his drawings as finished works of art.

Object facts

• Title: A Track on the Edge of a Wood with a Peasant Carrying Sheep
• Date: after 1640
• Creator attribution: Anthonie Waterloo (Dutch, 1609/10–1690)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Charcoal and wetted charcoal and gray wash on cream laid paper
• Dimensions: Image and Sheet: 25.8 x 39.5 cm (10 3/16 x 15 9/16 in.); Mounted: 26.8 x 40.4 cm (10 9/16 x 15 7/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - Dutch
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2020.144

A detail from the museum

This drawing likely depicts the sandy, wooded region of Veluwe in the southern part of the Netherlands.

Collection credit

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Peters, Emily. "Dutch Drawings." In The Keithley Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art, edited by Heather Lemonedes Brown, 26-31, 38-41. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2022.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.