“Wooded Hilly Landscape”
For today, a warm and luminous pastoral scene.
“Wooded Hilly Landscape” is an oil on canvas landscape painting by the English Romantic artist, Abraham Pether, from 1785. He painted this when he was just 29 years old.
In this painting, Pether depicts a warm-hued evening pastoral scene. Two shepherds stand at a point on a trail that overlooks a winding river. In the distance, a small cluster of classical style buildings stand next to an arched stone bridge. The shepherds are watching their sheep who are grazing in the green grass further up the river. The buildings and arched bridge reflect in the river’s smooth water.
There are five layers of depth to this scene that are masterfully woven together. First, the foreground with the tree and bushy vegetation. Second, the shepherds standing further back on the trail. Third, the sheep with the arched bridge and buildings. Fourth, the dramatic, rocky cliff faces and mountains located just behind the structures. Finally, the lighter and more distant background that silhouettes against the pink of the evening sky, with structures dotted in the distant trees.
Most known for his moonlit scenes, Pether also created idyllic and pastoral landscapes. The setting was often an imagined Italian scenery and would include the ruins of classical Italian architecture. Though the landscapes look realistic, they were not considered realism. The style of art that Pether employed, landscape for its own sake, was first pioneered in the British Isles just decades earlier by Welsh artist, Richard Wilson.
“Wooded Hilly Landscape” is currently in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in the United States.
For more on Abraham Pether, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
Thank you for sharing this painting with us. Often I agree with your selection, but this time I hesitate. The painting has some very clumsy details. So the sheep are too big in relation to the house, the bridge is leading from nowhere to nowhere and is too high, the rocks are not very realistic etc. And it is impossible for the sheperds to reach the sheep, since they are at the other side of the river. Maybe these figures are not meant as sheperds at all and is it just a guess from you?
best regards
Frans Driessen
Hello Frans! Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments. The thought that the figures are shepherds is totally my own interpretation. There is no real information about this painting out there, so I couldn’t corroborate. I just thought the staffs the two figures were holding looked like shepherd crooks. And I did notice the bridge to nowhere. If anyone can provide more information, I would gladly amend the page!
I’ve covered several of Abraham Pether’s nighttime paintings, which are what he is most remembered for, and rightly so. They are stunning. Generally, his daytime landscapes were painted solely from his imagination where he painted pastoral and idyllic countryside scenes with Italian buildings or ruins. He was capitalizing on the popularity of the Grand Tour and wanted to sell these to tourists, the wealthier young gentlemen, as souvenir paintings. In that regard, it makes sense that proportions are off, or that it may be sloppily done.
I wanted to cover one of Pether’s lesser-known paintings. I like to see a wide repertoire of art, when possible, as it adds to the artist’s personal story. Flaws and all. Is there an artist you would like me to cover that I haven’t?