A Pastoral Scene

Asher Brown Durand

National Gallery of Art

A placid river winds past low hills with cows to fields blanketed with trees leading back to mountains lining the horizon in this hazy, horizontal, landscape painting. The river curves in a tight backward C shape from the lower left corner of the composition. The right half of the foreground closest to us is made up of a gently sloping, grass-covered hill alongside the water. Four cows graze in the sunshine closer to the water, and the right portion is in deep shade under towering trees that nearly fill the right half of the composition. Logs, moss-covered boulders, stones, and plants line the bottom edge of the painting. Languid, golden light works across the treetops in the middle distance. The mountains along the horizon, which comes about a third of the way up this painting, are slate gray. The sky above is streaked with pale yellow near the horizon and deepens to pale blue along the top edge of the canvas. A few deeply shaded, ivory-yellow clouds float across the sky. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower center, “A B Durand 1858.”