Hippolyte Boulenger – Cow by the Ditch, 1864

by Atelier Liesjes

A red-and-white cow stands with her head lowered at the edge of a dark ditch. She is seen from the side and from behind, so that her broad back and the white patches on her flank dominate the picture; her horns curl forwards, her tail hangs down alongside her leg. The water is almost black and reflects only a few patches of light. Above the cow, a dense canopy of leaves frames the scene: oaks and alders with green, golden-yellow and rust-brown foliage, broken here and there by a streak of pale light. To the left, a muddy path winds its way through the grass, and in the distance, beyond the trees, lies an open field with two more cows and a low horizon. Boulenger painted this scene with the immediacy of someone working on location. There is no posing, no idealised animal: the cow stands just as she is, drinking or grazing, indifferent to the painter. The paint is applied loosely and fluidly, with short strokes in the foliage and longer strokes in the coat, and the warm glow of late summer is present in every detail.
The colours are rich and warm: rust-brown and carmine red in the coat, sap-green and golden yellow in the foliage, umber and almost black in the shadows, and a pale mother-of-pearl where the light filters through the leaves. The style is realism, akin to the Barbizon School and the Tervuren School. The theme is country life, the animal in its landscape and the languor of a warm day. The feeling evoked by the work is one of tranquillity, warmth and a gentle melancholy. Hippolyte Boulenger (Tournai 1837 – Brussels 1874) was a Belgian landscape painter of the pre-Impressionist Realist movement and the leading representative of the School of Tervuren. A warm, rural painting that fits perfectly into a farmhouse, country house or natural interior.