Unlike his father and his brother, both leading marine painters, Adriaen van de Velde deliberately turned away from the family trade of seascapes to become one of the finest Dutch landscape and animal painters of his generation. Born and baptised in Amsterdam in 1636, the son of Willem van de Velde the Elder and younger brother of Willem van de Velde the Younger, also represented in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' collection, Adriaen trained first with his father before moving to Haarlem to study under the landscape painter Jan Wijnants. There he encountered Philips Wouwerman and Paulus Potter, both animal specialists whose influence on his subsequent development the eighteenth-century biographer Arnold Houbraken and later scholars alike regarded as decisive.
Working from Amsterdam from around 1657 until his early death in 1672, at just thirty-five, Adriaen produced a prolific and varied body of work despite his short career: tranquil pastoral landscapes populated with herders and cattle in an Italianate manner indebted to Potter, Nicolaes Berchem and Karel du Jardin, alongside beach scenes, winter landscapes, portraits set within landscape settings, and occasional religious and mythological subjects. His compositions are notable for their delicate handling of light and confident treatment of the human figure, qualities that made him much in demand among fellow Amsterdam artists, who regularly employed him to supply the figures and animals for their own landscapes; he worked in this capacity for Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema and others, and, according to Houbraken, was engaged in exactly this kind of collaborative work, painting animals into paintings by Jan van der Heyden and Frederik de Moucheron, at the time of his death.
The paintings by Adriaen van de Velde held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, an extensive coastal landscape with a shepherd and horseman, and a herdsman and cattle at a stream, exemplify the calm, carefully lit pastoral idiom for which he remains admired, and situate him, alongside his brother's very different marine specialism, within one of the most artistically productive families of the Dutch Golden Age.