Siberechts’ topographical views stand at the forefront of the English landscape tradition and this pastoral scene belongs to a group of works in which the artist synthesises landscape and genre painting, depicting the tranquillity of a warm summer’s evening after a long day’s work. A maiden is presented in the foreground, riding a donkey through a brook, from which the animal drinks, with cattle, goats, and sheep in tow. She holds a basket of freshly picked flowers, the most distinctive of which appears to be a tulip – perhaps an allusion to the artist’s Netherlandish roots. A cow behind this group has its body directed towards a red sack, which sits beneath an enormous willow tree that dominates the entire composition. This bundle was presumably left accidentally by the maiden, so the cow moos as though to alert her, seemingly to no avail. Immediately behind, climbing the sloping hill, is a man on horseback, who appears to be herding a bull away from the cow ahead. He is followed by two other figures, one carrying a bundle of washing on their head, whilst the other carries what looks to be a rake. The remainder of the landscape meanders and folds over itself fluidly, suggesting a great distance that separates the foreground with the far-flung buildings in the background. A pleasing pastoral section to the left, showing cattle and sheep grazing on a newly ploughed field, is interrupted by a quarry, which indicates the effective productivity of the area’s land, as well as its diversity of use.

The most distinctive feature within this diverse landscape – the absence of which might make one think this was Flemish countryside – is a characteristically English parish church to the right of composition. It is almost certainly the church of St Mary the Virgin in Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames. When the 1684 horizontal variant of our painting was sold at Christie’s Amsterdam in 1997 [Fig. 1] it was described as a view of Henley-on-Thames; Siberechts is known to have painted at least six vistas from various aspects in the Thames Valley, particularly focussed on Henley-on-Thames, in the 1690s. Henley was an important trading centre between London and Oxford and the artist was likely commissioned by Sir Robert Clayton, a former Lord Mayor of London who had considerable estates between Henley-on-Thames and Marlow, to document the landscape from which his wealth was derived.

It is thought that the artist painted some 100 paintings in his career; ours is one of only 65 that are dated and one of only thirty known paintings that he made during his near-thirty years in England. The grand houses and surrounding estates of Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire, Longleat in Somerset, and Chatsworth in Derbyshire were all meticulously rendered in oils by the artist during his time in England; suitably impressive commissions for proud nobles who were flourishing after the restoration of the crown in 1660. Siberechts’ English landscapes follow much the same formula as his earlier paintings made in Flanders, centering around prominent trees bathed in soft light with a background receding to distant hills, as seen here. Figures tend to be subordinate to the landscape, and the viewer’s eye is drawn from the relatively dark foreground to the brightly lit vista in the background. The bright blues, whites, and reds of the foreground figure’s clothing stand out starkly against the verdant earthy colours of the composition’s background, whilst the willow tree in the middle-distance anchors the perspective of the whole landscape.

Jan Siberechts (1627 - 1703) was born in Antwerp to the art dealer-sculptor Jan Siberechts (c.1599 - 1676) and Susanna Mennens. He became a master of Antwerp’s Guild of St Luke in 1648, serving as its 'wijnmeester’ (master by patrimony) between 18 September 1648 and 18 September 1649. Several years later, on 2nd August 1652, he married Maria Anna Croes, with whom he had two daughters – their family home was a rented house in the Vlemicksstraat. Before his momentous move to London in the summer of 1672, Siberechts had specialised in painting bucolic landscapes in his native city for nearly twenty-five years. Siberechts’ move across the Channel was apparently at the invitation of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628 – 1687), whom he had met in Antwerp in 1670, to help decorate his Italianate mansion, Cliveden. While Siberechts’ patrons in Antwerp were largely drawn from the wealthy bourgeoisie and merchant classes, Buckingham was emblematic of the nobility and landed gentry who favoured the artist in England. Soon after his arrival there, the artist’s name increasingly became synonymous with the country house portrait, an early example of which is his 1675 depiction of Longleat for Sir Thomas Thynne (d. 1682). He also continued to paint pure landscapes of a type favoured in Antwerp, but much like his country house portraits, and unlike many of his earlier landscapes painted in Flanders, these works almost always contained topographical elements, as seen in the present painting.