Resting Herd in a Landscape with Ruins

Signed and dated painting from the closing phase of Roos’s lifetime, the early 1680s presents a broadly conceived landscape modelled in distinct intersecting diagonals. In the 1680s, Roos’s brushwork could be characterized as glazed lighted painting. Both in the front and rear planes, the space of the landscape is evenly filled with figures of animals and people. An interesting motif, reiterated in Roos’s works several times, is a pair of shepherds playing with a dog. In the case of the painting from the National Gallery in Prague, the landscape framework is delineated on one side by ancient-like ruins, probably inspired by the Colosseum in Rome, and on the other side, by rocks.