Meisje met twee koeien 1887

Albert Heinrich Brendel made this etching, titled "Girl with Two Cows," sometime in the 19th century. The pastoral scene depicts a young girl tending to her cattle in a field, a motif that carries deep cultural resonance. The cow, an ancient symbol of nourishment and motherhood, appears in various guises across cultures and epochs. Consider its sacred status in ancient Egypt as the goddess Hathor, or its association with fertility in Minoan Crete, where bulls were central to ritual practices. Here, however, the cow is part of a more quotidian scene, reflecting a Romantic fascination with rural life, yet it is the girl’s unwavering gaze and the cow’s placid feeding that evoke a sense of timeless harmony, tapping into our collective memory of humanity's enduring connection to nature. It seems that our subconscious is stirred by this image. And so, the image of the cow and her keeper, a motif as old as civilization itself, continues its cyclical journey through the visual world, forever transformed, yet eternally familiar.