Jan Wijnants, A Landscape with a Ruined Archway

Jan Wijnants specialised in painting landscapes which evoke the countryside around Haarlem, where he lived and worked. It was an area characterised by ancient sand dunes overgrown by scrubby woodland and open pastures interlaced with winding cart tracks.

It was also scattered with picturesque ruins. Many buildings had been destroyed by the forces of the Spanish occupation at the time of the siege of Haarlem nearly a century earlier and had never been rebuilt. These ruins feature only occasionally in Wijnants' work, although this archway obviously made an impression on him. He made at least three other pictures of it with figures and animals passing through the arch, or in the foreground.

Of these works, this painting focuses on the ruins most closely and to most dramatic effect. Wijnants has used the wall to create a long diagonal divide that runs from the foreground through to the middle ground of the painting. This line is emphasised by the three trees, and by three architectural markers – the two gateways and, in the woods far beyond, the distant spire of a church. The diagonal also emphasises the contrast in light and dark in the composition. Much of the foreground and wall are in deep shade, while a luminous sky behind takes up most of the rest of the painting.

Wijnants had a preference for depicting skies which were warm and bright, more evocative of Mediterranean weather than the cooler, greyer atmosphere of the rainy North Sea coast. In this he was influenced by Dutch artists known as the Italianates, who had travelled to and worked in Italy and popularised a romantic, idealised view of landscape suffused with the golden light of the southern sun.

Low light floods through the ruined arch, bathing the sheep and their shepherdess in a summery glow and casting long shadows in the pool of sunshine in the middle of the picture. The contrast between the strong light and deep shade is such that we may not, at first, even notice the second shepherd who has darted off into the shadows to haul back a couple of strays with his crook. This atmosphere of peace and stillness at the end of the day was not created by Wijnants alone. The figures and animals which are so integral to the light effects depicted were added to the scene by his frequent collaborator Adriaen van de Velde. It was common practice for a specialist painter to add figures to a landscape by another artist, but here they are unusually important to the overall scene and have been added with particular sensitivity.