Southern Landscape with Herdsmen

Now in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Pynacker's 1670 'Southern Landscape with Herdsmen' represents his latest documented Italianate work and shows the continued vitality of his approach even in the final years of his career (he died in 1673). The presence of this work in a major Scandinavian royal collection reflects the active trade in Dutch painting across the Baltic and North Sea regions: Danish and Swedish monarchs were significant collectors of Dutch Golden Age art from the mid-seventeenth century onward, their taste shaped by the same enthusiasm for technical excellence and atmospheric painting that drove collecting in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London. Herdsmen rather than shepherdesses appear as the primary figures, continuing the pastoral tradition in its masculine form and suggesting the practicalities of cattle and sheep management in the southern countryside. By 1670 Pynacker had spent over two decades translating Italian memories into paintings for Dutch buyers; this late work demonstrates that those memories, perhaps supplemented by prints and by the work of younger Italianate painters, remained a living resource for his pictorial imagination.

Oil on canvas, this late Pynacker shows a slightly warmer overall tone than works from his 1650s peak, possibly reflecting changes in the varnish or ground yellowing rather than a change in technique. The herdsmen figures are rendered with the confident abbreviation of an artist who has painted such subjects hundreds of times, each gesture legible without being laboured.