Pastoral Landscape with Ruins (1664): Artwork and History

Pastoral Landscape with Ruins (1664) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Adriaen van de Velde (Dutch, 1636–1672).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

With its warm southern sunlight and leisurely interactions between herders, this painting of the Italian countryside would have affirmed urban Dutch perceptions of rural areas as places of innocence and peace. The son of a painter, Adriaen van de Velde was also inspired by the cattle pieces of Paulus Potter and the Italianate pastoral scenes of Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem. He achieved a harmonious balance of elements by studying the landscape from life as well as by sketching the cattle in the pasture and the human figures in the studio.

Object facts

• Title: Pastoral Landscape with Ruins
• Date: 1664
• Artist attribution: Adriaen van de Velde (Dutch, 1636–1672)
• Place of origin: Holland
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 67 × 78.4 cm (26 3/8 × 30 7/8 in.); Framed: 81.3 × 92.4 × 6.4 cm (32 × 36 3/8 × 2 1/2 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1894.1024

Collection credit

Sidney A. Kent Fund

View the original

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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.