Artist: Pieter Bout
Date: 1680
Size: 36 x 26 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
The subject of the present painting is the Adoration of the Shepherds, its pendant (SK-A-2223, see the entries for missing works in Notes on the use of this catalogue pdf on startpage), which was stolen in 1993, depicted the Annunciation to the Shepherds, and together they sequentially illustrated Luke, 2:8-16.12 The banderole was presumably inscribed with words proclaimed to the shepherds as recounted by Luke (2:13-14). The signature present on this Adoration may not be reliable and is hardly legible; it is not dissimilar to that rendered as having been revealed after cleaning on the missing pendant. Certainly the name ‘Bout’ is not present in either case. Nevertheless the attribution to this artist may be thought secure because variants of the missing pendant are signed by him. One such is in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig; Klessmann, in addition, cites two others dated 1680 and 1681;13 another, signed and dated 1679, was offered on the London art market in 1996.14 Nica, however, doubts the attribution, and for this reason it is sensible to alter the ascription given in the 1976 museum catalogue to the circle of Pieter Bouts. As yet no signed variants of this Adoration have been traced. The style of the Rijksmuseum painting connects with that of the Haarlem artist Jacob Willemsz de Wet (active 1632-after 1675); indeed, the work was acquired with an ascription to the Dutch School circa 1640. Comparable is De Wet’s Adoration of the Shepherds in horizontal format in the Hamburg Kunsthalle that has been dated towards the end of the 1640s.15 Examples of De Wet treating the subject in an upright format are also recorded.16 De Wet’s work may not have been collected in the southern Netherlands, at least no paintings described as by him are recorded in inventories of seventeenth-century Antwerp collections published by Duverger. Such being the case, the proposed influence of De Wet in the present picture and related works could have resulted from Bout’s early sojourn in the United Provinces and Rotterdam in particular as proposed by Nica.17 However, it could be taken as a further reason for doubting the attribution to him. Granted the dates of variants of the stolen pendant of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, a date of circa 1680 may be thought acceptable. Gregory Martin, 2022
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