The steer at the center of this painting dominates this canvas even more than the one at the center of Berchem’s Crossing the Brook (CAT 218). Its muted brown color is not nearly as striking as the bright white of the other, but its sharp silhouette against the high blue sky gives a sense of solidity and security to the image that extends down through the sheep resting on the ground, to the seated woman with the baby in her arms, to the man standing tall behind her, and to the dog nosing something on the ground behind them both. Young Henry James, the future novelist, did not mention the Italian Landscapes by Swanevelt or Both when reviewing the Inaugural Exhibition for June 1872 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, but he did mention Berchem.
After noting that the great majority of 175 paintings were “of the Dutch and Flemish schools,” James turned his sophisticated focus to “the more important works.” These included paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Hals, Terburg, Netscher, Teniers, Van Ostade, Steen, Hobbema, Ruysdael, Berchem, and Breughel. Among all those, Berchem’s Rest was a “veritable pearl.” Even though “this charming little piece . . . is composed of elements more slender, possibly, than any of its companions, none of those have given us a more unmixed and tranquil pleasure. Surely, if human repose were ever to lose its precarious footing in our Western world, the idea would be tenderly embalmed in this delicious fragment of a pastoral.” Even though “a bare-legged shepherd, leaning on his staff above a sketchy tree, his wife on the ground nursing her baby, and a couple of meagre sheep, blinking at the noonday light, form the sum of its attractions,” this painting “lives, it smiles, it glows through the chill of time. Its sentiment is hardly more than a graceful trick; but the trick, performed for the hundredth time, still draws tears from the eyes” (p. 762).
Rest was still the only painting by Berchem at the Metropolitan Museum when Walter Liedtke published his comprehensive account of the Dutch paintings in the collection in 2007. Tracing Berchem’s evolution in subject, style, and medium from the 1640s into the early 1680s, Liedtke marveled at a painter “so eclectic and versatile that his ideas seem to come from countless sources and at the same time to be all his own.” One of Berchem’s “earliest known works,” Rest was “painted in 1644, when he was about twenty-two or twenty-three years old.” Apart from the dog at the lower right, the figures in the painting were “prepared with underdrawing.” The compositional structure, “with trees to the side, figures resting beneath them . . . dates back to the mid-1630s in the work of Jan van Goyen.” The figure of the standing man is made from a drawing Berchem sketched “from life,” but in a pose that “can be traced back to the Farnese Hercules.” In 2007, the painting was still “well preserved” even though “the paint film and ground have become more transparent over time,” causing “the wooden support” to begin “assert itself visually, appearing as darkened spots in the sky” (no. 5, pp. 24-26).
Berchem’s versatility and imagination are memorably expressed in Allegory of America, the drawing he created “as a model for an engraved title page in the second volume of an atlas on the Americas, Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Maior,” published in Amsterdam in 1662. Berchem made this drawing on a large sheet, 17 5/8 x 11 13/inches, with black chalk, brush, black ink, and gray wash (fig. 4). The drawing was donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 1959, three centuries after it was made. Berchem's intention, in the words of the Museum website, was to “reconfigure the New World allegory for a Dutch context by including a detailed setting alluding to trade and religion.”
