Jan Siberechts, A Cowherd passing a Horse and Cart in a Stream

In the painting, the arduous journey of a laden wagon from farm to market is a town dweller’s dream of life in the country. Jan Siberechts lived in the city of Antwerp and earned his living producing such scenes for an urban clientele. Drawing on his experience in the countryside around the city, he idealised what he had seen, portraying ‘the peasant’ as a noble, hard-working figure, showing little sign of the effects of labour in a country where the weather and other conditions could be harsh.

To achieve this, Siberechts repeated his engaging characters from picture to picture, chose bright, clear colours and often enclosed his scenes with dense foliage, giving little or no sense of distance and blocking out the world. The strong, healthy animals move slowly and patiently – going nowhere. The people in their neat and unbelievably clean clothing engage us, but not each other: the girl up to her knees in the river glances up at the wagon but no one acknowledges her. Many of Siberechts’s paintings portray girls wading or plonked down on a rock, soaking their feet in a stream and lifting their skirts to show sturdy legs, unmindful of damp petticoats. He has shown this girl with her back to us so we can see the detail of her cap, divided at the bottom to allow her hair, parted into two plaits, to poke through and wind round the little black frill behind her head.

The old woman in the strange, conical straw hat smiles, perched among her fresh, crisp wares – baskets of clean celery and turnips, enormous cabbages and a big brass jug of milk. But the line of her eyes, under their white eyebrows, is directed not at the girl close to her, who might be seen as speaking to her, but at someone or something out of the picture; the only contact with the outside world, it would seem. The boy riding the horse daydreams in his best red jacket, his flaxen hair unruffled by any effort. The reins idle in one hand, in the other is a flimsy twig, intended as a whip but put to little use. The horse’s hooves splash in the stream, jogging along but in no hurry. Wild columbine or ‘morning glory’ tangle up through the branches behind them and overhead two magpies fly among the branches.

This is indeed an idyll, but what seems to have given Siberechts, and incidentally us, the most pleasure are the details and textures he has included: the folds in the old woman’s collar tickled by the feathery leaves below; the sunlight on the girl’s legs and the folds in her white petticoat; the glint on the cow’s tough horn next to its fluffy tuft of hair. These are all part of the idyllic illusion but were, for the people living in the fast-changing cities of seventeenth-century Flanders, nostalgic and reassuring.