Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 81.5 cm × width 64.5 cm
Paulus Moreelse
A Shepherdess, known as ‘The Beautiful Shepherdess’
1630
Inscriptions
- signature and date, top right, with ligated monogram: PM / 1630
Technical notes
The finely woven, plain-weave canvas shows broad cusping on all four sides, and the tacking edges have not been trimmed. The support has been lined, but it has very definitely retained its original format. A yellow ochre ground layer appears to cover a grey first layer. Green underpainting is visible in the area of the flowers. The paint layers were fluidly applied. The yellow glazes of the mantle were built up in numerous layers, painted wet in wet.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 24 March 2003
Condition
Good. The yellow mantle is slightly abraded and the green bodice is discoloured, probably because of the presence of smalt.
Conservation
- H.H. Mertens, 1968: retouched
- M. Zeldenrust, 1979: complete restoration
Provenance
...; collection Bernardus Ocke (c. 1755-1816), Leiden, 1816;1 his sale, Leiden (W. van Veen et al.), 21 April 1817, no. 82 (‘Le portrait d’une jeune beauté; habillé en bergère; et le tient d’une main la houlette, et porte l’autre à la bouche; sa tête est couronnée de fleurs [...].’), fl. 2,150, to Van der Willigen, for the museum2
Object number: SK-A-276
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Paulus Moreelse (Utrecht c. 1571 - Utrecht 1638)
De Bie was the first author to give Moreelse’s year of birth; the artist’s baptismal record has not come down to us. His father, Jan Jansz Moreelse, was a cooper from Louvain. According to his 17th- and 18th-century biographers, Moreelse studied for two years with Michiel van Mierevelt, probably in Delft, and then spent a long period in Italy, where he received numerous portrait commissions in Rome. None of the paintings executed by Moreelse in Italy are known today. He returned to Utrecht by 1596, when he reportedly joined the saddlers’ guild, to which painters also belonged. In 1602 Moreelse married Antonia van Wintershoven. Because the ceremony took place in the town hall of Utrecht, Moreelse would not have been a member of the Reformed Church at this point. Later, however, he did join that congregation. His first dated painting, a Portrait of a Man is also from 1602.3 In the spring of 1611, Moreelse was elected dean of the saddlers’ guild and in September of the same year he became the first dean of the newly founded Guild of St Luke. He held this post again in 1612, 1615 and 1619. Twenty-eight pupils are recorded as having trained with Moreelse from 1611 on, more than with any other guild member. Together with Abraham Bloemaert, Moreelse was also one of the principal teachers at the drawing academy set up in Utrecht some time after the painters’ guild gained independence. Among Moreelse’s pupils were Dirck van Baburen (1594/95-1624), Pieter Portengen (c. 1612-43) and Jan ter Borch (?-1676). Two of his sons, Johan (after 1602-34) and Benjamin (before 1629-51), also became painters, and one of his daughters is reported to have assisted Moreelse with the execution of a portrait.
Moreelse was chiefly active as a portrait painter. In addition to his many portraits of Utrecht’s leading citizens, he received commissions from court circles, such as the 1621 Portrait of Sophia Hedwig, Countess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, as Caritas, with her Children.4 Moreelse’s 1616 Officers and other Civic Guardsmen of the IIIrd District of Amsterdam, under the Command of Captain Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh and Lieutenant Nanningh Florisz Cloeck (SK-C-623) is the only civic guard piece by a Utrecht painter to have survived. Moreelse also painted histories and genre pieces, and is credited with introducing the single-figure shepherdess into Dutch painting. His activities as an architect include a plan for enlarging Utrecht (executed posthumously in 1663) and the design of the Catherijnepoort (1621-25; destroyed), one of the town gates. After having supported Prince Maurits’s dismissal of Utrecht’s town council in 1618, Moreelse was given a seat on the new town council, which he occupied until his death. He also served as churchwarden of the Buurkerk, headman of the civic guard, an alderman, and chief treasurer of Utrecht. Paulus Moreelse died on 6 March 1638 and was buried in the Buurkerk.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 280v; De Bie 1661, p. 131; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 171, 178; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 49; Hoevenaar 1778, p. 9; Swillens 1926; De Jonge 1938, pp. 1-7, 139-53 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 322-25; Bok in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 311-12; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, p. 386; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2000; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2001, I, pp. 13-60, 203-50 (documents)
Entry
Apart from his substantial portrait oeuvre, Moreelse is most closely associated with the genre of the single-figure shepherdess. The earliest known painting of this type in the northern Netherlands is dated 1617 (fig. a) and was executed by Moreelse, who was most likely also the first Utrecht artist to use pastoral subject matter.5 Pastoral subjects were employed by Dutch artists in other cities before this time, but the most likely source for Moreelse’s single, bust and half-length figures were 16th-century Venetian depictions of courtesans.6
Of the approximately 15 shepherdesses painted by Moreelse, the Rijksmuseum painting is the most famous and the most often copied.7 A monogrammed replica from 1633 now in Princeton8 is considered to be a product of Moreelse’s studio by Domela Nieuwenhuis.9 The Rijksmuseum shepherdess is of the more slender, elegant type Moreelse developed in the mid-1620s.10 In those depictions as well, the figure is set somewhat further back from the picture plane and leans slightly toward the viewer, whom she engages with a come-hither look. The voluminous quality of the figure in the present painting is enhanced by the undifferentiated dark background and the yellow cloak in which she is enveloped. Unlike his other depictions of shepherdesses, the figure in the Rijksmuseum painting wears a veil instead of a straw hat or beret. The colouring and the lighting are also much more subtle than in the other comparable works. Some of Moreelse’s single-figure shepherdesses originally had male counterparts; it is known, for example, that the States of Utrecht gave a pair of paintings by Moreelse showing a shepherd and a shepherdess to Amalia van Solms in 1627.11 It is therefore possible that the Rijksmuseum Shepherdess also had a male pendant originally. The Rijksmuseum painting was first given the nickname ‘The beautiful shepherdess’ (De schone herderin) in print in the 1858 catalogue of the museum’s collection.
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. 220.
Literature
De Jonge 1938, pp. 121-22, no. 275; Domela Nieuwenhuis in Utrecht-Frankfurt 1993, pp. 228-30, no. 43; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2001, II, pp. 599-601, no. SAH192, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1821, p. 51, no. 212; 1843, p. 42, no. 215 (‘some spots in the background have burst, painting in the shadow in the neck’); 1853, p. 19, no. 189 (fl. 5,000); 1858, p. 95, no. 212; 1880, p. 220, no. 241; 1887, p. 116, no. 979; 1903, p. 184, no. 1661; 1934, p. 198, no. 1661; 1960, pp. 214-15, no. 1661; 1976, p. 397, no. A 276; 2007, no. 220
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Paulus Moreelse, A Shepherdess, known as ‘The Beautiful Shepherdess’, 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4645
(accessed 26 December 2024 16:53:11).