Shepherd Playing the Flute, and Four Shepherdesses

1632

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 92 cm × width 174.5 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, on the lower part of the shepherd’s staff (G and H ligated): GHonthorst ƒe 1632

Technical notes

The plain-weave canvas support has been lined twice. There is no visible cusping. The beige ground layer is visible at the reserve for the shoulder of the shepherdess holding a bunch of grapes. The blue background was painted after the figures had been completed. The paint layers were applied in a relatively rough manner with much visible brushmarking.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 29 November 2004

Condition

Fair. The painting is slightly worn throughout. The numerous, small retouchings and the varnish are very discoloured.

Conservation

H.H. Mertens, 1937: canvas lined
C.H. Jenner, 1937: canvas lined

Provenance

...; collection Floris Adriaen van Hall (1838-1929), Utrecht and Amsterdam, 1894-1924;¹...; sale, Hendrik Deen (1862-1934, Hoevelaken), Hoevelaken (J.D. Lammerts van Bueren), 20 February 1935 sqq., no. 64;...; from Sophie Rodriguez, née de Jong (Brussels), fl. 1,000, to the Vereniging Rembrandt, for the museum, 1937; on loan to the Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Muiden, since 1947

Object number: SK-A-3270

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Gerard van Honthorst (Utrecht 1592 - Utrecht 1656)

Gerard van Honthorst was born in Utrecht on 4 November 1592 into a family of artists. His father, Herman Gerritsz van Honthorst, was a decorative painter and probably his first teacher. According to Von Sandrart and Houbraken, Honthorst trained with Abraham Bloemaert. When exactly he went to Italy is not known; a drawn copy after Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Peter in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is dated 1616,² indicating that he was in Rome by that year. His first documented painting, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, was executed for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala in 1617-18.³ Such Caravaggesque night scenes, which often include artificial sources of illumination, garnered Honthorst the nickname ‘Gherardo delle Notti’ in Italy. Among his Roman patrons were the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose house Honthorst lived, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese.

A few months after his return to Utrecht in 1620, Honthorst married Sophia Coopmans. He joined the Guild of St Luke there and set up his own workshop. Von Sandrart, one of his apprentices in the 1620s, informs us that Honthorst had as many as 25 pupils at a time, from each of whom he received the sizable tuition fee of 100 guilders a year. With the exception of 1627, Honthorst served as dean of the guild between 1625 and 1630. It was also in the mid-1620s that he received his first commission from the court of Frederik Hendrik in The Hague.⁴ A commission from the British ambassador in The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, for Lord Arundel came as early as 1620⁵ and eventually led to the invitation from Charles I to work on Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1628.⁶ Honthorst returned to the United Provinces the same year, but continued to work for the English court in the years to come. In 1630 he became court painter to the exiled King and Queen of Bohemia, Frederick V and Elizabeth, in The Hague. Honthorst also painted numerous portraits of the Stadholder and his wife, Amalia van Solms, and took part in the decoration of, among others, the palaces Honselaarsdijk, Huis ter Nieuburch (1636-39) and Huis ten Bosch (1649-50). In order to accommodate his work in The Hague, he set up a second workshop there in 1637 and joined the guild, serving as dean in 1640. Also in 1637, he became the principal artist to decorate the Banqueting Hall in Kronborg Castle for King Christian IV of Denmark. Honthorst was, perhaps, the most internationally successful Dutch artist of his time. Despite, or possibly as a result of this success, his late style was criticized as ‘stiff ’ and ‘slick’ (‘stijve gladdicheyt’) and he was esteemed a ‘much less great master than themselves’ (‘beaucoup moins grand maistre qu’eux’) by his fellow artists working on the Oranjezaal.⁷ He died on 27 April 1656 and was buried in the Catharijnekerk in Utrecht.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Mancini c. 1620, fol. 86 (Judson/Ekkart 1999, p. 47); Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 22, 102, 172-74; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 149-50; Braun 1966, pp. 7-59, 340-88 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 276-79; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 382-83; Judson/Ekkart 1999, pp. XXXIII-XXXIV, 1-24

Entry

The pastoral genre in Dutch art was developed primarily in Utrecht in the 1610s and 20s, and the Caravaggist painters were in the forefront of the development.⁸ Excluding his pastoral portraits, Honthorst’s work in this genre is concentrated between 1622 and 1632.⁹ The present painting is the last in this group, and differs from the others in its extreme oblong format. It is this format, the use of half-length figures shown close to the picture plane, and the silhouetted repoussoir figure on the left that make this painting compositionally the most similar to the artist’s merry companies.

Pastoral scenes were particularly in vogue with the courtly circles in The Hague. In addition to the countless arcadian portraits that Honthorst executed for the courts of the King and Queen of Bohemia, and Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms, many of his pastoral scenes are known to have hung in their palaces. The primary example is Honthorst’s 1625 Granida and Daifilo Surprised by Artabanus’ Soldiers, now in Utrecht, which hung in Frederik Hendrik’s country palace, Honselaarsdijk.¹⁰ There is a distinct possibility that the Rijksmuseum’s Shepherd and Shepherdesses also decorated a palace. The low vantage point and oblong format warrant the idea that it was conceived as an overdoor.¹¹

The scene is not based on a literary text, as are some of Honthorst’s arcadian pictures.¹² Nor does it seem to be an allegory.¹³ The sensual nature of the painting has, nonetheless, led to at least one moralizing interpretation, whereby the bunch of grapes held by the bare-breasted shepherdess has been seen as a reference to the ‘Maechdenplicht’ (a maiden’s obligation to remain a virgin before marriage), while the reclining shepherdess with the extreme décolleté beside her is thought to be fending off the shepherd’s advances.¹⁴ However, the reclining shepherdess is clearly singing along to the shepherd’s piping, beating time with her left hand. In her right hand she apparently holds the text of their song. The fruit at her elbow and the grapes held by the bare-breasted shepherdess behind her may simply refer to nature’s fertility. Or, perhaps, Honthorst included this motif as a reference to Ovid’s story of the wood nymph Pomona, whose reluctance to be wooed was overcome by Vertumnus when he explained the grape vine and the elm tree’s need for each other.¹⁵ The painting’s original viewers would probably have been familiar with Ovid’s story, and quite possibly with depictions of Vertumnus and Pomona showing the latter holding a bunch of grapes.¹⁶ Rather than an exercise in moralization, the painting was probably intended to represent nothing more than a delightful pastoral romp.

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. 136.

Literature

Judson/Ekkart 1999, pp. 171-72, no. 211, with earlier literature

Collection catalogues

1976, p. 285, no. A 3270 (as Shepherd Playing the Flute, and Four Nymphs); 2007, no. 136

Citation

J. Bikker, 2007, 'Gerard van Honthorst, Shepherd Playing the Flute, and Four Shepherdesses, 1632', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9620

(accessed 20 September 2024 00:40:04).