Johann Heinrich Roos was born in the Palatinate; in 1640 he moved with his family to Amsterdam, where he became a pupil of Guilliam du Gardijn (1596-1647 / 57). Returning home, he became court painter to Charles Ludwig Elector of the Palatinate in Heidelberg in 1664. He left this role due to unsatisfactory working conditions and lived the rest of his life in Frankfurt, dying there in 1685 in a house fire.

As well as a portraitist, Roos was famous during his lifetime as a painter of bucolic landscapes in the style of the Dutch Italianates, Karel Dujardin and Nicholas Berchem, populated with herdsmen, flocks and classical ruins. An eighteenth-century biographer of the artist, H. S. Hüsgen, named him 'the Raphael of animal painters'. There are over 200 Roos paintings of this type, the earliest dating from 1657, and many drawings, including a charming study of sheep at Windsor (RCIN 912853). In Roos’ career here is no documented trip to Italy and no drawings recording specific settings which would place him there. He presumably derived his knowledge of the monuments which appear in his paintings from Dutch prints and drawings, which would have been a common feature of German collections at that time.

This beautiful idyll, of which a similar version is in Kassel, was executed in the middle part of Roos' career and might be compared with Karel Dujardin’s paintings of the same date. It shows a fountain, upon which stands a weather-worn version of a famous antique statue, then known as the ‘Belvedere Antinous’ (Museo Pio Clementino) and shown in reverse as if copied from a print. A cow drinks while sheep and goats loll about in the heat of the midday sun. A herdsman stops to pull on a loose boot, setting down his staff, a patient dog lies at his side. In the background a hilly Roman Campagna stretches away into the hazy distance.

This painting is typical of his work in being an imagined combination of landscape, ruin, man and animal, all of which Roos has bound together with beaming sunlight and created to evoke a nostalgia for a golden age. It has been suggested that Roos' scenes of this kind represent an imaginary haven from the devastation of the Thirty Years War.

Signed and dated JH Roos. Fec / 1667.