Scenes of peasant life with people engaged in everyday activities were prevalent in the 17th and 18th century. During the later 17th century, such genre scenes were no longer necessarily fraught with moral warnings. The attention for the landscape and the beauty of nature became more prominent. We see this on this canvas, where the painter has attached great importance to a realistic depiction of the livestock. He followed the specialists' footsteps in sheep, goat and cow images, Nicolas van Berchem and Paulus Potter. If we look at the river bank with the church and cottages, he seems to have painted a topographical landscape, but that is not easy to determine. The dramatic rendering of the sky was typical for several 17th-century Dutch landscape painters. The general atmosphere seems to have been an important focal point of the artist.