Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 114 cm × width 169 cm
frame: height 118.5 cm × width 173.5 cm
sight size: height 110.5 cm × width 165.7 cm
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp
The Shepherdess
1628
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower right (J and G ligated): JG. Cuyp. fecit / 1628
Technical notes
The support is a moderately fine, plain-weave canvas that has been lined. Cusping is present on all four sides. The ground has an ochre colour. The paint layers were applied in a broad manner with quite visible brushmarking. A blue pigment has become visible through the white apron covering the shepherdess’s right knee, suggesting that a change was made here during painting.
Scientific examination and reports
- X-radiography: J. Deuss, Dordrechts Museum, no. JCC 3, 18 November 2002
- technical report: J. Deuss, RMA, 11 November 2004
Condition
Fair. Two vertical impressions, one running through the head of the young billy-goat and the other through the head of the young boy, have been made by the stretcher. Two small, confined areas of cupping in the ground and paint layers are apparent in the tree at the upper left and the shepherdess’s hat. Her blue skirt is quite abraded, and there are some discoloured retouchings, such as the face of the young boy and above the head of the billy-goat. The varnish has blanched and is discoloured.
Provenance
...; from the Jacobson Gallery, London, fl. 1,000, to the museum, December 18981
Object number: SK-A-1793
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp (Dordrecht 1594 - Dordrecht 1652)
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp was baptized in December 1594 in Dordrecht. His father, the glass-painter Gerrit Gerritsz, was presumably his first teacher. Cuyp entered the Guild of St Luke in Dordrecht in 1617 and served as its bookkeeper in 1629, 1633, 1637 and 1641. According to Houbraken, he was one of the leaders of the fine art painters in their separation from the guild in 1642. His first extant painting, a portrait of the masters of the Holland mint,2 is from 1617, the same year that he joined the guild. His other public commissions were for a group portrait of the second company of the arquebusiers’ civic guard from around 16253 and the 1630 Allegory of the Capture of the City of ’s-Hertogenbosch,4 which was most likely painted for either Frederik Hendrik or a government body. In 1618, Cuyp married Aertken van Cooten from Utrecht. Significantly, Cuyp’s work from the mid-1620s onward shows the influence of Utrecht painters, especially that of Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651) with whom, according to Houbraken, Cuyp studied.
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp was the most important portraitist in Dordrecht in the first half of the 17th century. In addition to portraits, which make up approximately two-thirds of his extant oeuvre, he painted histories, genre pieces and still lifes. Among his numerous pupils were his half-brother Benjamin Cuyp (1612-52), his son Aelbert (1620-91), and probably Ferdinand Bol (1616-80) and Paulus Lesire (1612-c. 1654/56) as well. His last dated painting, Boy with a Wineglass, is from 1652.5 In a document from the same year, Aertken van Cooten is mentioned as the painter’s widow.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 237-38; Veerman 1977, pp. 16-17; Chong in Turner 1996, VIII, p. 291; Seelig in Saur XXIII, 1999, p. 239; Chong 2002a, pp. 202-04 (documents)
Entry
The Rijksmuseum’s Shepherdess from 1628 is a mirror-image variation of a painting Cuyp executed the previous year (fig. a). In addition to reversing the placement of the shepherdess and child in the Rijksmuseum painting, Cuyp added a ram and a young billy-goat in the foreground and a view of Dordrecht in the background. Cuyp seems to have worked out some of these changes in a black chalk drawing now in Darmstadt (fig. b). The dog in this drawing is placed behind the shepherdess as in the 1627 painting, but the direction of the figure, the ambiguous arrangement of her legs and her costume (in particular the slashed puffs at her shoulder) are the same as the present painting. The shepherdesses occupy the entire height of both paintings. A strip of canvas had been added to the top of the earlier painting, but was removed in a recent restoration.6 The suggestion that the Rijksmuseum painting has been cut down at the top is unwarranted, as broad cusping is present here.7 Significantly, the Darmstadt shepherdess also occupies the entire height of the drawing.
Cuyp derived the composition of his two paintings of a shepherdess and child from Abraham Bloemaert, whose Pastoral Scene of 16278 and undated Peasant Boy with Tobias and the Angel9 also show a figure, or figures, occupying a corner of the foreground in a landscape setting.10 Cuyp undoubtedly knew the latter painting, as he used the figure of the peasant boy shown in a similar pose for his Shepherd and Shepherdess in a Landscape with Cows.11 The shepherdess’s pose in the present painting, including her pointing gesture, is also very similar to that of the peasant boy in the work by Bloemaert. While Cuyp’s bright palette and drapery style are reminiscent of Bloemaert, his figures, especially in the present painting, are more robust and clumsy.
Kloek has identified the figure in the middleground of this and the 1627 painting as the sower in Christ’s parable related in the gospels of Matthew (13:1-23), Mark (4:1-20) and Luke (8:4-15).12 The sower’s seed, which Christ use as a symbol for God’s word, falls sometimes on the path, sometimes on hard rock, sometimes among thorns and sometimes on good soil. It is most desirable for both the sower’s seed and God’s word that they fall on good soil. The fact that the shepherdess is fully clothed and accompanied by a child, a young billy-goat and a lamb makes it difficult to accept the suggestion made by Kloek that she represents Lust, and thereby is meant to be viewed as the moral opposite of the sower, who represents contemplation.13 Instead, the shepherdess, the young animals, the boy and the flowers seem to allude to nature’s fecundity, specifically the fecundity of the countryside around Dordrecht, as that town is shown in the background. Rather than forming a contrast to the shepherdess, the sower from Christ’s parable (to whom the smiling shepherdess is moreover pointing) complements her; Dordrecht’s soil is not only fertile in the physical sense, but also in a spiritual sense, and one cannot be had without the other.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 53.
Literature
Chong 1992, p. 544, no. JC 76; Kloek 2002, pp. 48-49; Kloek in Dordrecht 2002, pp. 96-97, no. 7; Chong 2002b, p. 171, no. 13, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 79, no. 753; 1976, p. 185, no. A 1793; 2007, no. 53
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp, The Shepherdess, 1628', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7500
(accessed 1 April 2025 01:06:59).Figures
Image with id "mQuje" not found, published, or embeddable.
fig. a Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, Shepherdess with a Child in a Landscape, 1627. Oil on canvas, 101.5 x 175 cm. Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, inv. no. DM/002/799. Photo: Dordrechts Museum, purchased with the support of Bedrijfsvrienden Dordrechts Museum and Vrijwilligers Dordrechts Museum, 2002
Image with id "vAgMh" not found, published, or embeddable.
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, Seated Woman. Black chalk, 220 x 279 mm. Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Graphische Sammlung, inv. no. AE 649. Photo: Wolfgang Fuhrmannek
Footnotes
- 1 The painting was paid for by D. Wesselink, the leaseholder of the museum restaurant, where the painting came to hang. Verslagen 1898, p. 10.
- 2 Dordrecht, Museum Simon van Gijn; illustrated in Dordrecht 2002, p. 85.
- 3 Lost.
- 4 ’s-Hertogenbosch, Town Hall; illustrated in Dordrecht 2002, p. 107.
- 5 Belgium, private collection; illustrated in Dordrecht 2002, p. 163.
- 6 The strip was probably added sometime before 1818, as the Dordrecht painting is most likely the one described in a Paris sale catalogue from that year with dimensions (c. 129 x 178 cm) that come close to those of the Dordrecht work with the added strip of canvas: sale, Michalon, Paris (Henry), 30 March 1818 sqq., no. 103 (‘Une femme, la houlette en main et coiffée d’un chapeau de paille, garde un nombreux troupeau de brebis; près d’elle est un enfant qui lui fait sentir un bouquet de jonquilles. Plus loin, un villageois s’occupe à ensemenser son champ. Sur toile, h. 48, l. 66.’). With thanks to Jos Deuss, Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht.
- 7 See Technical notes. Kloek (in Dordrecht 2002, p. 96) suggested that the Rijksmuseum painting has probably been somewhat reduced in size.
- 8 Hannover, Niedersächsische Landesgalerie; illustrated in Roethlisberger/Bok 1993, II, fig. 622.
- 9 Minneapolis, Institute of Art; illustrated in Roethlisberger/Bok 1993, II, fig. 591.
- 10 Kloek 2002, p. 48.
- 11 Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum; illustrated in Dordrecht 2002, p. 103.
- 12 Kloek in Dordrecht 2002, p. 94.
- 13 Kloek in Dordrecht 2002, p. 94.