Object data
oil on panel
support: height 35.5 cm × width 25.8 cm
outer size: depth 7 cm (support incl. frame)
Pieter Bout (attributed to)
The Adoration of the Shepherds
c. 1680
Inscriptions
- signature, indecipherable text, bottom right
- inscription, indistinct, top right, on the banderol held by the angel above
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 1 September 2006
Provenance
…; collection A.Th.V.A. Deckers, Amsterdam; from whom, with SK-A-2223, fl. 350, to the museum, 1906; on loan to the Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, Amsterdam, 1956-2018
Object number: SK-A-2224
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Pieter Bout (active Brussels from 1670/71 - died Over-Heembeek, Brussels, 1689)
Landscape and painter of figures on a small scale, Pieter Bout’s date and place of birth are not known. A dearth of biographical information was early noted.1 His earliest, extant dated painting is of 16742 but he may have been taught and/or been active in Rotterdam, before his marriage in 1667 in Brussels to Joanna Garnevelt. In 1670/71 he was registered as a master in the Brussels guild of St Luke, and in the same year he is recorded as living in his wife’s stepmother’s house in Over-Heembeek. Bout may have been active in Paris,3 where his portrait was engraved as of ‘van Bouc’ by Gerard Edelinck (d. 1707);4 but as the sitter is not in contemporary costume, the identification is not certain. There Bout may have worked for Adam Frans van der Meulen (1631/32-1690); a copy by him was recorded in the latter’s estate, the prototype having been of 1668 or 1674.5 Bout has long been considered to have executed the staffage in landscapes by, among others, Adrien-François Boudewyns (1644-1719);6 there are apparently no extant works signed by both artists to substantiate this, but a painting attributed to them was already listed in a shipment of 1710 from Ghent to Paris.7 Boudewyns is said to have left Paris for Brussels in 1674, having been active in the French capital for some fifteen years.8 Bout was the beneficiary of a codicil to a will made in Antwerp, 19 March 1684, in which he was described as ‘de schilder Bout tot Brussels’.9 His last dated extant painting is apparently of 1686.10 He was buried in the Sint-Nicolaaskerk in Over-Heembeek on 19 June 1689.11
REFERENCES
J. Nica, Bijdrage tot de studie van het werk van Pieter Bout ( -1689), 3 vols., Brussels 1994 (diss. Vrije Universiteit), I, pp. 11-23
Entry
The subject of the present painting is the Adoration of the Shepherds, its pendant (SK-A-2223, see the entries for missing works in Notes on the use of this catalogue pdf on startpage), which was stolen in 1993, depicted the Annunciation to the Shepherds, and together they sequentially illustrated Luke, 2:8-16.12 The banderole was presumably inscribed with words proclaimed to the shepherds as recounted by Luke (2:13-14).
The signature present on this Adoration may not be reliable and is hardly legible; it is not dissimilar to that rendered as having been revealed after cleaning on the missing pendant. Certainly the name ‘Bout’ is not present in either case. Nevertheless the attribution to this artist may be thought secure because variants of the missing pendant are signed by him. One such is in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig; Klessmann, in addition, cites two others dated 1680 and 1681;13 another, signed and dated 1679, was offered on the London art market in 1996.14 Nica, however, doubts the attribution, and for this reason it is sensible to alter the ascription given in the 1976 museum catalogue to the circle of Pieter Bouts. As yet no signed variants of this Adoration have been traced.
The style of the Rijksmuseum painting connects with that of the Haarlem artist Jacob Willemsz de Wet (active 1632-after 1675); indeed, the work was acquired with an ascription to the Dutch School circa 1640. Comparable is De Wet’s Adoration of the Shepherds in horizontal format in the Hamburg Kunsthalle that has been dated towards the end of the 1640s.15 Examples of De Wet treating the subject in an upright format are also recorded.16
De Wet’s work may not have been collected in the southern Netherlands, at least no paintings described as by him are recorded in inventories of seventeenth-century Antwerp collections published by Duverger. Such being the case, the proposed influence of De Wet in the present picture and related works could have resulted from Bout’s early sojourn in the United Provinces and Rotterdam in particular as proposed by Nica.17 However, it could be taken as a further reason for doubting the attribution to him.
Granted the dates of variants of the stolen pendant of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, a date of circa 1680 may be thought acceptable.
Gregory Martin, 2022
Literature
J. Nica, Bijdrage tot de studie van het werk van Pieter Bout ( -1689), 3 vols., diss. Vrije Universiteit, Brussels 1994, I, no. 72
Collection catalogues
1976, p. 139, no. A 2224
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'attributed to Pieter Bout, The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1680', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6208
(accessed 22 November 2024 22:47:26).