Landscape with Resting Cavaliers and a Shepherd with his Flock

Nicolaas Aartman

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A shallow pond in a wide open landscape serves as the drinking place for a herdsman’s flock of sheep. Along the left bank, two soldiers and their horses are equally using the pond as a place to repose. More figures can be distinguished on the slope to the left, and in the right background, a little village is situated. This drawing, executed in brush and gray ink, was made by the eighteenth century Dutch draftsman Nicolaes Aartman. Aartman produced numerous designs for book illustrations as well as small-scale independent drawings. This little genre scene may have been intended as an artwork in its own right. Aartman likely drew the scene from his imagination, using well-established motifs, such as the herd and the woman seated on a mule, to construct an elegant and picturesque Arcadian landscape – a theme that was highly fashionable at the time.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art