Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepherd

c. 1630 - c. 1645

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 34 cm × width 26 cm
outer size: depth 5.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, bottom right, in ligated monogram: HP

Technical notes

The support is a single vertically grained oak panel bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1590. The panel could have been ready for use by 1601, but a date in or after 1608 is more likely. The ground is off-white. The flesh tones in the face were painted quite quickly, wet in wet. Impasto was used for the hands and the costume.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 16 February 2005
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 1 July 2005

Condition

Good. The costume was probably a bluish green originally, but it has discoloured and has become whitish here and there. The varnish is also discoloured.

Provenance

...; from E. Warnecke, Paris, fr. 1,500, to the museum, 1904

Object number: SK-A-2135

The artist

Hendrick Gerritsz Pot (Amsterdam c. 1580 - Amsterdam 1657)

Hendrick Gerritsz Pot of Haarlem was probably born in 1580, although there are no documents from which this can be deduced. He was registered as an unmarried young man from Amsterdam when he posted the banns of his marriage with Janneken Theunisdr de Ram in 1610. He is recorded as one of Karel van Mander’s pupils by the latter’s anonymous biographer. He was first recorded as a painter in 1606, when he became a member of the Haarlem civic guard. He and his wife were in England in 1632, where he painted several portraits of King Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria, among other works. On Pot’s return to Haarlem, Frans Hals painted him twice in civic guard portraits, the first time in the Officers and Sergeants of the St Hadrian Civic Guard of 1633, and again in the Officers and Sergeants of the St George Civic Guard of 1639.¹ As a sergeant, Pot took part in the conquest of Heusden in 1625 and served as a lieutenant in the Haarlem civic guard for several years. He also occupied various posts in the Guild of St Luke for over two decades: as warden in 1626, 1631, 1634 and 1648, and as dean in 1635. He moved to Amsterdam at the end of his life, where he acquired citizenship on 7 June 1650. He was buried there in the Oudezijdskapel on 15 October 1657. Houbraken states that Willem Kalf (1619-93) was his pupil in Amsterdam.

In addition to portraits, Pot made a number of history paintings and genre scenes, most of them merry companies in the manner of his fellow townsman Dirck Hals. There are very few early dated works. The Glorification of Prince William of Orange of 1620 was a major early commission from the city of Haarlem, for which he was paid 450 guilders.² It was destined for the dining hall of the Prinsenhof. A second version, since lost, originally hung in the Magistrates’ Chamber in Delft Town Hall.

Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007

References
Ampzing 1628, p. 371; Schrevelius 1648, p. 383; Van Bleyswijck 1667, p. 127; Houbraken II, 1719, pp. 123, 218; Bredius/Haverkorn van Rijsewijk 1887, pp. 161-76; Bernstein in Thieme/Becker XXVII, 1933, pp. 301-02; Van Thiel-Stroman in Haarlem-Worcester 1993, pp. 334-35; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 273-76

Entry

This painting was purchased by the museum as a portrait of the poet Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679). The main reason for the identification must have been the laurel wreath on the shepherd’s head and the rough resemblance to other portraits of Vondel. It is not, however, convincing.

This work fits easily into the iconographic tradition of pastoral scenes with shepherds and shepherdesses that enjoyed a vogue in the first half of the 17th century.³ Some of them are of anonymous figures, but others are portraits historiés, and it is not always possible to say which is which. That is the case here. Given the fact that the shepherd has individualized features and is standing indoors beside a table, it is quite likely that this is indeed a portrait, but it is no longer possible to discover who the sitter was.

The painting probably had a companion piece of the man’s beloved clad either as a shepherdess or as the goddess Flora. Various shepherds and shepherdesses by Pot, some of them pendants, have recently been sold at auction, and a few have almost the same dimensions as the Rijksmuseum’s painting. In almost every case the figures are slightly larger than this one, and were placed very differently within the picture space. The most likely candidate for a companion piece is A Portrait of a Woman with a Laurel Wreath.⁴

A few 17th-century Haarlem inventories mention paintings with shepherds and shepherdesses by Pot.⁵ In those cases, too, it is unclear whether the pastoral figures were anonymous or portraits historiés. Perhaps the names of the sitters were no longer known when the inventories were drawn up.

It seems reasonable to date this monogrammed painting to the 1630s or early 1640s on the evidence of the stylistic resemblance to Pot’s works from that period.

Everhard Korthals Altes, 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. 246.

Literature

McNeil Kettering 1983, pp. 77-78

Collection catalogues

1908, p. 370, 1907a (as Portrait of Joost van den Vondel); 1934, p. 228, no. 1907a; 1976, p. 453, no. A 2135; 2007, no. 246

Citation

E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'Hendrik Gerritsz. Pot, Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepherd, c. 1630 - c. 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5089

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