The support is a single vertically grained oak panel bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1590. The panel could have been ready for use by 1601, but a date in or after 1608 is more likely. The ground is off-white. The flesh tones in the face were painted quite quickly, wet in wet. Impasto was used for the hands and the costume.

Good. The costume was probably a bluish green originally, but it has discoloured and has become whitish here and there. The varnish is also discoloured.

…; from E. Warnecke, Paris, fr. 1,500, to the museum, 1904

Object number: SK-A-2135

This painting was purchased by the museum as a portrait of the poet Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679). The main reason for the identification must have been the laurel wreath on the shepherd’s head and the rough resemblance to other portraits of Vondel. It is not, however, convincing.

This work fits easily into the iconographic tradition of pastoral scenes with shepherds and shepherdesses that enjoyed a vogue in the first half of the 17th century.³³McNiel Kettering 1983; Utrecht-Frankfurt 1993. Some of them are of anonymous figures, but others are portraits historiés, and it is not always possible to say which is which. That is the case here. Given the fact that the shepherd has individualized features and is standing indoors beside a table, it is quite likely that this is indeed a portrait, but it is no longer possible to discover who the sitter was.

The painting probably had a companion piece of the man’s beloved clad either as a shepherdess or as the goddess Flora. Various shepherds and shepherdesses by Pot, some of them pendants, have recently been sold at auction, and a few have almost the same dimensions as the Rijksmuseum’s painting. In almost every case the figures are slightly larger than this one, and were placed very differently within the picture space. The most likely candidate for a companion piece is A Portrait of a Woman with a Laurel Wreath.⁴⁴Panel, 33 x 26.5 cm; sale, Paris (Tajan), 27 October 2000, no. 42.

A few 17th-century Haarlem inventories mention paintings with shepherds and shepherdesses by Pot.⁵⁵See, for example, Haarlem, Archiefdienst voor Kennemerland (NAH 632, no. 109; GPI, N-4908): ‘Staet en inventaris vande boedel en nalatenschap van Catharina de Jonker weduwe van Jan Groen (...) opt aengeven van Gerrit Willemsz, Cornelis Blankestijn ende Diedrik Salm als voochden over ’t minderjarige nagelate soontje vande voorsn. Catharina de Jonker (...) 12 junij 1697 (...): Een harder en een harderin van Pot (‘Schedule and Inventory of the belongings and estate of Catharina de Jonker, widow of Jan Groen (...), as stated by Gerrit Willemsz, Cornelis Blankestijn and Diedrik Salm as guardians of the surviving son of the aforesaid Catharina de Jonker, a minor (...) 12 June 1697 (...): A Shepherd and Shepherdess by Pot). In those cases, too, it is unclear whether the pastoral figures were anonymous or portraits historiés. Perhaps the names of the sitters were no longer known when the inventories were drawn up.

It seems reasonable to date this monogrammed painting to the 1630s or early 1640s on the evidence of the stylistic resemblance to Pot’s works from that period.

Everhard Korthals Altes, 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. 246.

McNeil Kettering 1983, pp. 77-78

1908, p. 370, 1907a (as Portrait of Joost van den Vondel); 1934, p. 228, no. 1907a; 1976, p. 453, no. A 2135; 2007, no. 246

E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'Hendrik Gerritsz. Pot, Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepherd, c. 1630 - c. 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20026070