Mountain Region with Peasants riding

In the 17th century, three generations of Dutch painters studied the Italian style of landscape painting. These “Italianate painters” were less concerned with the testimonies of the ancient world than with the characteristics of the landscape in the southern sunlight and with what they saw as pristine rural life. They found ideal scenery in the environs of Rome – in Tivoli, the Tiber valley and the Campagna. In most cases, their experience of Italy influenced the stylistic development of the Dutch landscape painters.
When they returned home, they retained these subjects. Their pictures are not realistic renderings of the landscape, but paradisal countryside scenes bathed in golden light. The mild, sunny ambience suggests peace and harmony. The remembered image is sublimated into a southern mood painting.
Works by the “Italianates”, much in demand both at home and abroad, fetched high prices. Artists such as Philip Wouwerman and Aelbert Cuyp painted Italian landscapes without ever having travelled in Italy. Berchem, too, had already produced an extensive oeuvre of Italianate paintings before his first visit to Rome in 1651. He was one of the most prolific painters in this genre.
This landscape attributed to Berchem is painted in a relaxed style, the contours not strongly marked, with a skilfully added repoussoir in front of the mountains receding horizontally into the clouds. According to Renate Trnek, this rendering is characteristic of workshop variations dating from the 1660s. The painting repeats an earlier signed composition in the same format, and is linked to Berchem’s well-known mountain landscape with three herds – Drie Kudden (1656, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).

OEHRING Erika: Berchem Nicolaes, Mountain region with peasants riding, in: DUCKE Astrid, HABERSATTER Thomas, OEHRING Erika: Masterworks. Residenzgalerie Salzburg. Salzburg 2015, p. 34