Nicolaes Berchem, The Cows at the Watering Place (The Cow Drinking), 1680, etching on paper. The Clark, 2023.15

Throughout his paintings, drawings, and etchings, the French Baroque artist Claude Lorrain perfected the genre of idealized landscape. Claude consolidated the developments of sixteenth-century Italian landscape painters, fusing a sensitive observation of nature with the lofty nobility of classical values. Claude lived and worked in Rome from the 1620s until his death; there, he influenced the Dutch Italianates—northern European artists who traveled to Italy and embraced the local style of landscape painting. A century later, the English Rococo artist Thomas Gainsborough developed a new kind of nostalgic, pastoral landscape, inflecting the naturalism of Claude and the Italianates with a yearning for simpler, country life.

The idyllic tranquility of the lives of shepherds became a prominent subject in literature, music, and the visual arts over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This exhibition explores how artists depicted rural life by considering their representation of cows, cottages, mules, maidens, shepherds, ruins, and overgrown landscapes. Selected primarily from the Clark’s strong holdings of drawings by Claude Lorrain and Thomas Gainsborough and supplemented with select loans of Dutch Italianate artworks, this exhibition analyzes pastoral imagery to examine how artists construct their own visions of an idealized landscape. 

Pastoral on Paper is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by William Satloff, Class of 2025, Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.