Rembrandt as a Shepherd with a Staff and Flute, Govert Flinck, c. 1636 – (Govert Teunisz Flinck) ◄ Předchozí Další ►

Umělec: Govert Teunisz Flinck

Datum: 1636

Velikost: 75 x 64 cm

Technika: Oil On Canvas

Crowned with a laurel wreath and holding a flute and a shepherd’s crook, this half-length figure is one half of Govert Flinck’s earliest known essays in the pastoral mode. The painting – also on canvas and of similar dimensions – of a young woman shown half-length now in Braunschweig was most likely the pendant (fig. a). Together they may have been the ‘Tronitjes’ of a shepherd and shepherdess by Flinck that were put on the block at an anonymous sale in Amsterdam in 1700 and recorded in the 1776 catalogue of the Duke of Braunschweig’s collection at Salzdahlum.17 It was apparently during the Napoleonic occupation that the pair became separated, the Braunschweig picture eventually returning to its rightful owner and the Rijksmuseum painting only being documented again in 1920, when it was on sale from an anonymous collection in Frankfurt.18 Dated 1636, the Braunschweig Shepherdess is one of Flinck’s three earliest signed and dated works.19 It was probably in that year or the previous one that he spent time in Rembrandt’s studio in order to assimilate the style that, in Houbraken’s words, ‘was universally praised, such that everything had to be made on that last were it to please the world’.20 Flinck’s model for the Shepherdess was his teacher’s 1634 Flora in St Petersburg.21 The similarities in costume and pose – the latter including the placement of the woman’s left hand on her protruding abdomen, signifying nature’s fecundity – are unmistakable. Flinck, however, reduced his prototype to a half-length figure and provided her with a different iconographic identity by means of a shepherd’s crook. While the Shepherd does not follow a Rembrandt model, the chiaroscuro and pudgy limbs and facial features in both works are obviously indebted to that master. The rather slack, broadly brushed treatment of the light purplish-blue coat worn by the shepherd recalls the style of Flinck’s first teacher, Lambert Jacobsz. In depicting the shepherd and shepherdess as pendants Flinck followed a trend initiated by such Utrecht painters as Abraham Bloemaert and Paulus Moreelse in the 1620s.22 By 1636, however, such pairs were also being produced by Amsterdam artists, including Jacob Backer, with whom Flinck had spent time in Jacobsz’s workshop.23 Unlike most of the shepherdesses from Utrecht, those by Backer do not have revealing décolletés. Compared to the Utrecht pendants, that by Flinck is very chaste; even his shepherd does not reveal any flesh, which cannot always be said for those by Backer. Flinck’s Shepherd and Shepherdess have been traditionally considered to be likenesses of Rembrandt and his wife Saskia Uylenburgh. However, comparison with the only documented portrait of Saskia, a 1633 silverpoint drawing by Rembrandt,24 makes this identification of the shepherdess questionable.25 The resemblance of the shepherd to Rembrandt’s self-portraits, especially a 1630 etching, is much greater.26 Notwithstanding the possibility that Rembrandt, and perhaps even Saskia, served as models, the pendants were unlikely to have been conceived as formal portraits, but rather as types in the well-established pastoral genre. Jonathan Bikker, 2023 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements