Tails of Two Cities

Ruminations on cows at the Louvre and National Gallery

Aelbert Cuyp’s Paysage près de Rhenen: vaches au pâturage (Landscape near Rhenen: cows at pasture), 1650 / 1655. Photo by the author

“They order, said I, this matter better in France.”

That’s the opening line of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey in which the protagonist, Parson Yorick, travels through France. At this stage, Yorick is speaking confidently, but also quite ignorantly. A Sentimental Journey is full of charming vignettes and is known to have greatly influenced the developing genre of 18th century travel writing.

Even though it was published in 1768, Yorick’s sentiments are the kind of thing that could have been said at almost any time before or since — by any citizen, regardless of which side of the English Channel or La Manche they may have been.

It’s a somewhat predictable exchange of barbs: the British and the French love to compare conditions in their respective countries, usually (but as we have seen, not always) in their own country’s favour. These are two countries that fought a Hundred Years’ War (widely believed to have finished in 1453); they are next-door neighbours with a water hazard in between just to make things more interesting. Conflict and comparison are a way of life.

The French are Rosbif; the British are Frogs. The French insist: Our food is celebrated all around the world, but the Brits “just know how to make tea.” The process of finding subtle advantages over each other is neverending.

Indeed, in one of Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia, “Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist," the essayist tells us that the aptly named Mrs Battle favoured Whist as a card game precisely because it created “steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever-fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille¹, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath; but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the great French and English nations."

“Long, steady... rational, antipathies"—these strike me as demonstrating quite a philosophical view of the matter, especially so soon after the Napoleonic Wars. It is almost as if the rivalry had become another feature of the landscape, like the white cliffs of Dover or the Loire Valley. No one is surprised by it, but it is still worthy of comment.

So it was historically predetermined that when I visited the Louvre a year ago, I compared it to the National Gallery in London. I even looked up a few details online. The Louvre is bigger, more famous, and has more visitors per year. The National Gallery is a little more specialised (focusing on painting), is easier to get around (less crowded), and entrance is free (the Louvre costs 17 euros to enter, and there’s also a complicated queuing system).

The Louvre used to be a palace, has vast courtyards, and, of course, now boasts an iconic glass pyramid. The current building for the National Gallery, which celebrates its bicentenary this year, was purpose-built² and is on Trafalgar Square, at the very heart of the city, with Admiral Nelson’s statue overlooking it. The gallery moved there in 1838, and due to its location, it has little room to expand. And its latest extension, the Sainsbury Wing, is not, shall we just say, universally admired. 

I love both museums, of course.

I have been visiting France since I was a teenager. However, I'd usually stayed in other parts of France and had only been to the Louvre a few times. So, as I arrived at the Louvre on a cold and slightly damp morning, I was warmed by the exciting prospect of seeing great paintings I hadn’t seen for some time. I also felt the thrill of anticipation of discovering some new favourites. 

As I entered, impatient after the long weight outside, I was energised by the prospect of seeing Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa) by Théodore Géricault and La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People) by Eugène Delacroix. And, of course, the Mona Lisa, among many others. 

It was busy, as I’d expected, and became steadily more so. There were visitors from Spain, Italy, Germany, Latin America, the USA, Japan, and China, and those are just the ones I recognised from their language or accent. 

But if I say that I was prevented from seeing as many of the big favourite artworks there by a herd, I am not referring to that common way of describing our fellow tourists (but never seeing ourselves as part of them), but an actual herd of cows. And when I say cows, I don’t mean an encounter with real cows (though this actually happened at another time during the same winter holiday), but a small herd of cows peacefully at pasture in a painting by Aelbert Cuyp³. 

The painting lassoed me as I passed unwittingly with its deeply textured sky and pastoral scene, but it was the cows, softly brown, massive, and serene, that reeled me into an inner orbit before settling me down for a prolonged enjoyment of the painting’s gravitational attraction.

You may well ask, Why this painting? Why Aelbert Cuyp’s Paysage près de Rhenen: vaches au pâturage (Landscape near Rhenen: cows at pasture)? There are plenty of beautiful paintings in the Louvre. Goodness knows, there were many other beautiful paintings just in that room. My answer: the cows. I grew up on a dairy farm and am drawn to images of cows in fine art, just as a wasp is drawn to the jam oozing from a doughnut. And furthermore, these are no ordinary cows; they’re finely painted in a ravishing scene of pastoral ease. They’re beautiful.

Cuyp’s placid but compelling depiction of the animals transported me back to the first decade and a half of my life, when I would sometimes accompany our dairy herd on the Devon farm at pasture, having been required to call them in for milking or, more rarely, to report on the expected birth of a new calf. Not all the memories are happy; on one infamous occasion, at about the age of 8, I proved an unreliable witness as to whether a particular calf had been successfully delivered and wasn’t asked to carry out this particular mission for years afterwards.

But mostly, it was enjoyable to walk the fields with purpose in spring, summer, and autumn among these lumbering animals. It turns out that a painting of cows, a work of fine art in a wonderful museum by a celebrated landscape painter, yokes together two otherwise incompatible beasts of burden in my psyche: on the one hand, my rustic upbringing in the Devon countryside, happy enough but lacking much exposure to art; on the other, my adult self’s love of painting. 

Even at this moment of rapture over this pastoral delight, however, my desire to compare England and France, Paris and London, could not be resisted. I found myself mentally juxtaposing Cuyp’s work with another celebrated painting featuring what’s purportedly a calf, which hangs in London’s National Gallery. It’s a completely different kind of painting, though coincidentally, it’s by a Frenchman, Nicholas Poussin. I was thinking of The Adoration of the Golden Calf. 

Nicolas Poussin - The Adoration of the Golden Calf 1633-4. Public Domain.

Now, these two paintings actually have little in common, except for their (very different) use of bovine subject matter and the fact that they were probably painted within 20 years of each other (the Cuyp is later). Poussin’s canvas depicts the adoration of the golden calf by the Israelites, apparently based on chapter 32 of the Book of Exodus. The golden calf, which is rather large and would be described as a “bullock” in the Devon of my youth, despite the bucolic surroundings, is not placed in a naturalistic agricultural setting. It’s here as a symbol of a false idol, painted into an imaginary landscape surrounded by a crowd of people whose clothing and demeanour all stem from a French 17th century painter’s idea of ancient Israelites.

Of course, Poussin shows off his painterly skill with the golden calf, with that wonderful, impatient gesture of the raised right foreleg, as he does with the deep poetry of the sky and landscape. The people, to me at least, look a lot like those in other Poussin paintings⁴, cavorting and dancing, which is how he excelled in depicting his human subjects in the first part of his career. I had long admired this work, along with many others by the same artist. And now it came to mind, in this other museum, in front of this other painting, because of that calf (or bullock). The contrast intrigued me.

In the Cuyp, there are no symbols, much less idols. There are simple bovines in the world, trenchantly living their cow-ness...The work is detailed and exact; the bright stream of urine flowing from the rear of one of the cows is a great touch and a very familiar one from my childhood... Cuyp, it seems, painted a lot of cattle, and I don’t know a better painter of them, though some of the animals (in other paintings, including some at the National Gallery) have an interesting habit of staring moodily off to the side, as if they were the models for a 17th century Edward Hopper painting.

A couple of hours or so after my extended detour into Cuyp’s pastoral scene, I fought my way, exhausted, out of the Louvre, via some rather depressing underground commercial passageways (the National Gallery is so much easier to leave!), into the bright winter sunshine and the Jardin de Tuileries. I walked across almost empty gravel terraces towards the shimmering Seine. For once, I failed to compare it unfavourably with the Thames. I could also see the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance, but now I gave it little attention as I was still dreaming of pastoral idylls and reflecting on the power that beautiful images and idols have over us. Virtually alone, I was still in my Arcadian trance.

Two days later, I was back among the crowds, this time at the Gare du Nord, where I’d catch the Eurostar, heading back to England. After 20 minutes or so, the train was crossing the wide, open countryside of Picardy, pointing like an arrow towards London, Trafalgar Square, and the National Gallery. Behind me lay Paris, that great city so well described as “a landscape built of pure life” by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

I looked out at the huge fields speeding past my window, dotted with huge wind turbines gently turning in the slight breeze. It was a landscape so different from the one I’d known in Devon, with its small fields and undulating hills. There I was, comparing again. And it may have been because of the time of year, or it may have been because of the type of agriculture favoured in those parts, but as I craned my neck for a better view of the horizon, I found there was not a single cow to be seen. 

Vive la différence⁵, I whispered to myself as I settled back in my seat to admire the view.

1. A card game: https://gambiter.com/cards/hombre/quadrille.html

2. It's never been regarded as a gem of London architecture. When it was first constructed, the novelist William Thackeray dismissed it as "a little gin shop of a building."

3. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/aelbert-cuyp

Many of Cuyp’s paintings are also at the National Gallery, who describe him as “the great interpreter of the Dutch landscape in the Italianate manner."  And then, rather tersely, they note: "In 1658, he married a wealthy widow and appears to have painted little thereafter." 

4. The National Gallery claims to have the greatest collection of Poussin paintings outside of the Louvre. And in 2022, there was an exhibition on Poussin and the Dance. For a fascinating glimpse into the art of this wonderful painter, try this very accessible lecture by the exhibition's curator: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/past/poussin-and-the-dance/curators-introduction

5. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Vive+La+Diff%C3%A9rence