The Meeting of Granida and Daifilo, Jan Mijtens, c. 1655 - c. 1660 – (Johannes Mytens) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Johannes Mytens

Date: 1660

Size: 110 x 142 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

When this painting by Jan Mijtens was first exhibited in The Hague in 1881 it was said to be the biblical story of Isaac and Rebecca.5 On entering the museum it was called Shepherd Idyll,6 but shortly afterwards it was renamed Jacob and Rachel.7 Although Stechow recognized the subject in 1929 as the meeting of Granida and Daifilo it took until 1956 for that to be recorded in a collection catalogue.8 This is a depiction of the third scene of the first act of the pastoral play Granida by Pieter Cornelisz Hooft, which was initially performed in 1605 and was published in 1615. It was a great success and was staged in Amsterdam almost annually between 1642 and 1663. The printed version had its eighth edition in 1679.9 While the shepherd Daifilo and the shepherdess Dorilea are bickering over her feeling that he is merely wooing her for the fun of it and not out of love, the Persian princess Granida appears. She has lost her way after becoming separated from her hunting party. Here she is holding the bowl that Daifilo will shortly fill with water from the fountain. He is totally smitten by her charms, which infuriates Dorilea, who can be seen between them in the background. Granida is delighted by the simplicity of the pastoral life, which is in stark contrast to the corruption and dishonesty at court. That, though, does not prevent Daifilo from accepting her invitation to accompany her there. The fact that these events are set outdoors, whereas the next three acts take place in a Persian palace, made this a very popular scene for seventeenth-century Dutch painters,10 who produced at least 32 pictures of the encounter between Granida and Daifilo.11 When the Rijksmuseum acquired the canvas in 1900 it was thought to be a portrait historié,12 but it was only in 1935 that Martin described it as such in the literature.13 That view persisted for a long time, and was still being supported by Van den Brink in 1993 on the grounds that the figures of Granida and Daifilo are given greater prominence than they would get in an ‘ordinary’ history piece.14 In 2006, however, Bauer rightly observed that, compared to Mijtens’s other likenesses, here the physiognomies are in fact highly standardized.15 Of all 32 known paintings of the subject in Dutch art it is the one by Dirck van Baburen of no earlier than 1623 that can unequivocally said to be a portrait historié, and that is on the evidence of written sources.16 Its protagonists are depicted far larger, relatively speaking, than in the present scene. In every other case the portrait nature is rendered uncertain by the small size of the figures or the lack of adequate reference material. With 10 works as opposed to 150 likenesses, the genre of history painting was clearly a very minor part of Mijtens’s output.17 Like the group portraits, they are set against a landscape background which plays an essential role in the scene, as it does in this Meeting of Granida and Daifilo. Here it is presented as an Arcadia, with the addition of a fountain with sculpted putti of the kind that could be found in parks. The topmost one is winged like a cupid and is holding a pitcher. The connotation of a fountain of love is thus unmistakable in this context. The picture is not dated, but the warm tones and flowing execution place it stylistically in Mijtens’s later oeuvre, so it can be assigned to the latter half of the 1650s.18 Van den Brink pointed out that there was once an overmantel in the Princessehof in Leeuwarden that was probably either a replica or a copy after the Rijksmuseum painting.19 Judging by a photograph in which it appears, it was a little narrower and lacked the fountain on the right. Richard Harmanni, 2023 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements