According to an entry in the diary of Gerrit van der Pot, the art dealer Jan Danser Nijman bought this painting around 1795 in Dordrecht from someone called Onderwater, who had it hanging in his house as an overdoor.9 As chance would have it, Aelbert Cuyp’s only daughter Arendina (1659-1702) married a brewer called Pieter Onderwater (1651-1728) in 1690, who bought the Dordwijk country estate outside Dordrecht in 1692.10 In 1816 Van Eynden and Van der Willigen thought it likely that the property, which was still in the hands of Pieter’s descendants, originally belonged to Cuyp himself, and several later authors accepted this as the truth.11 They also said that ‘a number of paintings that he made in his youth as well as at a more advanced age and depicting subjects of every kind are still found there today and, as we have been informed, there were formerly far more of his notable works of art there’.12 This created the idea that paintings that originally came from Cuyp’s own house had been sold in the recent past by the Onderwater family, and that one of them was this Landscape with Herdsman and Cattle in Gerrit van der Pot’s collection. It is no longer possible to discover whether the Rijksmuseum picture really did come from Dordwijk and whether there were many more in the manor. In 1856 it was radically remodelled, and nothing is left of the former decoration. One thing, though, is certain, and that is that Cuyp never owned the estate.13 There is no consensus on the attribution of this painting. Stechow regarded it as a crucial work marking the transition from the manner inspired by Both to Cuyp’s mature, late style.14 Chong and Kloek are doubtful and see the hand of a pupil or follower.15 It is very comparable in every respect to Herdsman and Cattle at a Bridge in Madrid.16 It, too, has a dark strip of land in the foreground, a body of water beyond and a distant vista in which the pale pink sky and the landscape merge almost imperceptibly. That authentic picture, however, has a more logical structure. There is a better distinction between light and shade, which makes it clear that the evening is drawing in,17 and in addition the clouds have more force and volume, the animals and the figures have been worked up better, and the foliage is crisper. Although there are a few similarities in the painting technique, such as the treatment of details in the foreground, there are also major differences that stand out particularly plainly when a direct comparison is made. The cows in the Rijksmuseum picture, for instance, were executed uncertainly and clumsily, while those in Madrid are sharp and subtle. Something that is atypical for Cuyp is the canvas’s square format. That has always been explained as a consequence of its supposed function as an overdoor, but that is far from sure. In any case, the suspicion that the work is not by Cuyp but by a pupil or follower seems justified.18 Although the painting is not up to the standard one would expect of Cuyp it did serve as a source of inspiration for the later Dordrecht artist Jacob van Strij (1765-1815), the composition of whose Landscape with Cattle Driver and Shepherd in the Rijksmuseum is directly based on it.19 The motif of a herdsman on a donkey also recurs in several works by him and other Cuyp followers.20 Erlend de Groot, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements