A large-format landscape — the first fully developed landscape in the large-format works, and the most chromatically inventive. Rolling hills recede into a background of pale blue sky; in the middle ground, multiple trees are drawn in pencil with their branch structures specific and observed; in the foreground a pink cow grazes at the lower center. The entire scene is bathed in warm yellow light, the hills and ground washes in yellow and green watercolor, the trees described with brief hatching marks for the foliage. The cow at the center is the composition's most specific and most charming element: pink-washed with pencil structure, its head down in grazing.
The pink cow is the collection's only animal subject at anything approaching finished scale — the candles-in-barrel study (1580) had no animals, and the landscape (1491) was purely topographic. Here the animal appears as a full compositional element: the cow below the trees, in the landscape, doing what cows do. The pink wash gives it an unrealistic but appealing quality — not a naturalistic rendering of a brown-and-white cow but a warm, felt animal presence in a warm, felt landscape.
The large format (25 by 33.5) gives the landscape composition the scale of a proper painting, the trees reaching nearly to the top of the sheet, the sky and hills filling the upper portion with receding space. Among the works in the collection, this is the most resolved landscape — more complete than the signed small-format landscape (1491) and more spatially developed than any of the watercolor backgrounds in the figure studies.