Likely a pupil of Nicolas Berchem, whose work is also represented in this exhibition, Dujardin visited Italy in the years 1652-1655 and revisited the rural themes and earthy vigour of Pieter van Laer’s prints, as seen in this comic scene of happy pigs. His landscape with a donkey and sheep, by contrast, incorporates such low subject matter into a grander compositional conception aligned with the work of Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (around 1604-1682), yielding a synthesis of classicism and naturalism that served the artist for the remainder of his career, in various media.