Dutch Farm

A family works on a tidy farm, as a child helps his mother milk their small herd. Along the stream, a line of trees marks the water and a path through the fields to other farmsteads. The action of light and clouds on the green meadows draws the eye to the low, rolling hills in the distance. In the foreground, a cow drinking and a growling dog worry each other across the stream.

The brother of the landscapist and art theorist Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Hermanus Koekkoek specialized in shore and riverside scenes. A member of academies and artists' societies in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, he spent most of his career in the latter city, though he died in the Hague.
Like other Dutch Romantic artists, he freely invented and rearranged landscapes to achieve a certain effect.