Untitled, graceful barnyard, large oil on canvas, relined, 35 x 50 1/2 inches, signed lower right. Provenance: Prominent Westmount family. Aelbert Cuyp’s graceful barnyard work is likely one of the last grand paintings of his life. Once he married Cornelia Bosman in 1658, his artistic career gradually came to a halt. In the early 1650s, Cuyp transitioned away from landscape painting and created many large-scale works that focused on foreground figures. Here, Cuyp depicts various large scale barnyard animals; a male mallard with its female and a duckling, another fowl sitting on higher grounds, who all appear to be chasing away a rooster, which Cuyp highlighted by his masterful use of the full chromatic scale of twilight colours. The application of light brown and straw yellow tones, which he learned early on in his career from the prolific Dutch painter Jan van Goyen, give the subjects an added depth and luminosity that sets Cuyp’s work apart from his contemporaries. Cuyp was one of the Dutch leading Golden Age painters.