The Milkmaid (van Leyden)

A milkmaid with her pail and a herdsman with his staff stand on either side of two cows in a farmyard, the man casting a sidelong glance her way. Little happens, and that is the point: Lucas van Leyden engraves ordinary country life for its own sake, in one of the earliest prints to take peasants and their animals as a worthy subject, decades before such genre scenes became a Netherlandish specialty. A Dutch prodigy who measured himself against Durer, Lucas handles the burin with astonishing freedom, the cows' hides and the rutted ground alive with tone. He signed it with his monogram and the date 1510.