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Overview
Adriaen van de Velde made 24 etchings in the course of his short career. Te Papa currently has five of them in its collection, all of them presented by Bishop Ditlev Monrad to the Colonial Museum in 1869. This etching is Plate 2 from a series of three, entitled Cows and sheep. It depicts a bull - or more properly a steer or neutered bull - of an impressively rendered piebald pelt. In close proximity but facing the opposite direction are two recumbent sheep, while a third stands some distance away. The setting is a meadow in rolling - not very Dutch-looking - countryside, with a wild arum in the foreground, significantly left untouched by the grazing animals.
See: J. Paul Getty Museum, 'Adriaen van de Velde', http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/545/adriaen-van-de-velde-dutch-1636-1672/
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art April 2019