Cow Drinking (1680): Artwork and History

Cow Drinking (1680) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Nicolaes Berchem Dutch, 1620-1683.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Nicolaes Berchem was the most famous Dutch painter of idyllic Italian views, but he also made over 50 etchings of pastoral subjects dealing with shepherds and their animals. This mature and ambitious print (in which the cow is, in fact, not drinking, but much else seems to be happening) was made from a 1679 drawing that is now in the Dutuit Collection, Paris.

Object facts

• Title: Cow Drinking
• Date: 1680
• Artist attribution: Nicolaes Berchem Dutch, 1620-1683
• Place of origin: Holland
• Medium: Etching on paper
• Dimensions: Plate: 27.7 × 37.4 cm (10 15/16 × 14 3/4 in.); Sheet: 28.1 × 37.8 cm (11 1/8 × 14 15/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1924.517

Collection credit

The Joseph Brooks Fair Collection

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.