The pastoral genre of literature, art, or music depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle - herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. The target audience is typically an urban one. A pastoral is a work of this genre.

Pastoral Scene

Adriaen van de Velde was the son of Willem van de Velde I and the younger brother of Willem van de Velde II. Like other close family members he devoted his activities to view painting although he replaced marine compositions with country scenes. The artist began his studies in the family workshop in Amsterdam and completed his training with the Haarlem painter Jan Wijnants. Adriaen van de Velde painted winter landscapes, beach scenes, biblical subjects and bucolic views in which he revealed his natural abilities at interpreting light and atmosphere. Although he died young aged thirty-five, he was a prolific artist over the course of a career of almost two decades, producing drawings, prints and paintings. Adriaen van de Velde is primarily known and appreciated for his landscapes in which the figures and animals frequently occupy an important position.
The present canvas is signed and dated 1663. At this period Van de Velde principally focused on scenes of the Italian countryside, although there is no documentation to suggest that he visited Italy. Pastoral scenes of this type would be his preferred subject matter during the last ten years of his career. Inspired by the Italianate painters living in Amsterdam in the 1650s, Van de Velde depicted landscapes bathed in an intense southern light in which shepherds and their animals are set within idyllic landscapes of green meadows and clear blue skies.
Pastoral Scene conforms to this type of work and depicts two peasants peacefully resting by a stream, surrounded by cows, sheep and other animals. Van de Velde locates the principal motif in the foreground on the left while he used the right side of the canvas to open up a path that leads to the foot of a mountain and also included a secondary scene with another figure.
As Robinson noted, this canvas and its related drawings allow us to reconstruct the artist’s working methods with regard to the construction of the composition. Van de Velde initially made an overall sketch of the composition. This was followed by a second drawing in which he defined the forms and resolved compositional issues, using this drawing as the basis for a third one in which the composition is presented almost in its final state. Van de Velde also made sketches from life of the locations that he depicted and of animals, which he later worked up in the studio. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York has one of the preparatory drawings for this canvas in which the figures and animals in the principal scenes and their immediate surroundings are completely defined. The most notable differences between the drawing and the final composition are the landscape background and the passage that terminates the composition on the right. Gaskell referred to the fact that elements in this painting are to be found in other works by the artist, including the group with the cow and the sheep lying in the foreground, which is to be seen in Mercury and Argus in the Liechtenstein Collection in Vaduz.

Pastoral Symphony

“Erwachen heiterer Gefühle bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande”(“Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country”) – Beethoven draws us in immediately with a gorgeous flowing theme (with a harmonized tail) over a rustic open-fifth drone (think: bagpipes), briefly teases us with a pause as if lingering on the threshold, and then opens the door wide to a warm and irresistible invitation to join him as he enters nature’s realm.

“Szene am Bach”(“Scene by the brook”) – The mood of calm contentment continues as the strings introduce a lovely motif to invoke a gently babbling brook – as Lam notes, an ideal aural image that is still yet always flowing, drawing us into a state of timeless contemplation. Its precursor is found in Beethoven’s earliest 1803 sketches for this work – two jottings labeled “murmur of the stream” and “the more water the deeper the tone.”

“Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute”(“Merry gathering of the country folk”) – Here, we encounter people for the first time, intruding upon the earlier idyll with a lusty peasant dance (although not for long – nature will soon reassert itself to show who’s really the boss). We also have a rare instance of Beethoven’s humor – a bassoon that plays only two tones (tonic and dominant). Schindler claims that this was meant as mimickry of a tired village bassoonist who sporadically wakens from his slumber by instinctively playing a few basic notes, and that the entire movement was meant to emulate the seven-member band at Beethoven’s favorite country inn, the “Three Ravens,” for which he had written a number of dances. (Schindler further notes that the theme was inspired by a popular Austrian dance of the time, but others assert that the first written evidence of such a dance arose only decades later and thus the dance could have been derived from Beethoven’s movement – if so, an intriguing reversal of the usual flow of thematic inspiration from folk to serious music.) William Drabkin notes that the unusual structure of the movement – a full repeat of both the 3/4 scherzo and two 2/4 trios followed by an abridgement of the opening 3/4 section – was needed to expand its scale to suit the rest of the symphony. Perhaps the most remarkable feature, though, is the abrupt ending – the dance rises to a vigorous F-major cadence and then tries to repeat the figure but instead abruptly breaks off the attempt and plunges into f-minor for a sudden shift to:

“Gewitter, Sturm”(“Storm, Tempest”) – Far too many commentators go on at length about this “realistic” depiction of a violent summer storm, but they miss the point (as does Sigmund Spaeth, who complains that it “is not particularly convincing”).

“Hirtengasang. Frohe, dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm”(“Shepherds’ song. Happy and thankful feelings after the storm”) – The final movement is perhaps the most heartfelt of all. It begins with an Alpine hunting call that evolves effortlessly into a meltingly gorgeous swaying tune that, in turn, launches a rondo which Lam depicts as the simplest in all of Beethoven’s works, and thus suitable to express the sentiments of unassuming shepherds.Indeed, he considers the movement’s title to refer not to relief from the terrors of the storm, but rather gratitude for the life-giving refreshment of its nurturing rain. Although Beethoven retains the trombones from the preceding movement to underline the depth of feeling, he returns us to the same gentle peace and relaxation of the opening. The ending is inspired – no climax, but rather soft motivic repetitions that recall the brook scene, capped off by a final strong peremptory cadence, perhaps to remind us that after all this is just a piece of music and to abruptly and firmly return us to the artifice and pressures of our urban world.

Pastoral Poetry

Pastoral poetry originated in the Greek Hellenistic period when the poet Theocritus wrote about rural life in the countryside. His poetry was later imitated in Latin by the Roman poet Virgil, who set his pastoral poems in a fictionalized version of Arcadia. Arcadia is a region in Greece but in literature, came to be known as a kind of bucolic utopia, where many pastoral poems are set. Virgil’s pastoral poems were famous for emphasizing the contrast between urban and rural life; he also was influential in the way he used the pastoral poem as a vehicle for political allegory.

Pastoral poetry was revived during the Renaissance, where it first made its way from Latin into Italian, and then into Spanish, French, and English. An early, and influential, pastoral work in the English language was Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579).