Pan Tending his Flock

Entry

In spite of Rooses’s critical comments,⁴ Jacob Jordaens’s authorship of this work has never been doubted; its date of execution has been recently and acceptably placed in the first half of the fourth decade.⁵ The marked Halsian character of the protagonist’s face suggests that it may have been painted following the artist’s first recorded visit to Holland in June 1632.

The youthful figure has been identified as the god Pan;⁶ Schelte Adamsz Bolswert’s engraving after the picture – very probably made with Jordaens’s approval (see below) – thus identifies him. But this is problematic as although he has goat’s legs his face is not goat-like nor is his ear. That X-radiographs show that here Jordaens first depicted a human pointing with his left hand makes the issue even more problematic. He plays a flute⁷ rather than the reed pipes, the instrument associated with Pan, following his ineffectual pursuit of Syrinx.⁸ Held has claimed that the subject was inspired by Pliny’s account of how the Greek artist Protogenes, to convey his sense of security while he was protected by King Demetrius during the siege of Rhodes, painted a ‘satyr called ‘avapouomenos [resting], and he is holding his pipes’.⁹

Possibly Jordaens here originally intended simply to depict one of the satyrs, who with Pan inhabited the Arcadia of ancient Greece and were associates of Bacchus. Thus he may have wished to convey the carefree escapism described by Virgil, evoking Pan, in the Georgics, especially in Book II, lines 493-501: ‘Happy, too, is he who knows the woodland gods, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister nymphs! Him no honours the people give can move, no purple of kings, no strife rousing brother to break with brother, no Dacian swooping down from his leagued Danube, no power of Rome, no kingdoms doomed to fall: he knows naught of the pang of pity for the poor, or of envy of the rich. He plucks the fruits which his boughs, which his ready fields, of their own free will, have borne.’¹⁰

It was the god Pan who was identified in the anonymous hexameters beneath Schelte’s print, which in translation reads: ‘Pan sits laughing in the shade of a verdant beech, draws charming sounds sweetly from his throat. Beating the ground with their feet his young flock makes merry and pluck the grass untroubled’.¹¹ This descriptive rather than prescriptive message may well have expressed Jordaens’s final intentions.

X-radiographs make it clear that Jordaens did not originally intend to depict Pan (as toes can be made out), nor did the reclining male play a flute. His left arm was extended, much as that of the reclining Pan in an earlier drawing on the verso of a sheet in the Louvre, Paris, whose pose D’Hulst already associated with that of the Pan in the present picture.¹² Jordaens’s original idea for the use of the canvas is thus obscure; but it seems likely to have been for a subject different from that he finally determined on when mythological accuracy was not his main concern.

The two sheep (with a goat in place of the ram) recur in Jordaens’s sketch at Hamburg for the Kassel Infant Jupiter Fed by the Goat Amalthea, dated by D’Hulst slightly later than the Satyr Tending his Flock.¹³

As mentioned above the composition was engraved in reverse and in edited form by Schelte Adamsz Bolswert (c. 1584/88-1659);¹⁴ it is quite likely that the editing was done by Jordaens himself, as one of the chief alterations was the extension of the width of the composition to the left to allow for the introduction of a nanny goat whose pose and appearance is similar but not identical with that on the left of the Rijksmuseum Pan Punished by Nymphs (SK-A-601). The other main alteration was to heighten the composition to allow for a greatly enlarged arbour and taller tree opposite with a revised landscape background in which appear two trees whose trunks cross (a similar motif appears in the X-radiograph). These enlargements – allowing for less significant, additional elements at the left and bottom – are too great to warrant a suggestion that the field of the painting originally had such proportions and was subsequently reduced, an eventuality made even less likely by the cusping in the support.

Gregory Martin, 2022