Shepherd Playing the Flute, and Four Shepherdesses, Gerard van Honthorst, 1632 – (Gerard Van Honthorst (Gerrit Van Honthorst)) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Gerard Van Honthorst (Gerrit Van Honthorst)

Date: 1632

Size: 92 x 175 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

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.