The Shepherdess

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.