A Shepherdess, Paulus Moreelse, 1630

Apart from his substantial portrait oeuvre, Moreelse is most closely associated with the genre of the single-figure shepherdess. The earliest known painting of this type in the northern Netherlands is dated 1617 (fig. a) and was executed by Moreelse, who was most likely also the first Utrecht artist to use pastoral subject matter.5 Pastoral subjects were employed by Dutch artists in other cities before this time, but the most likely source for Moreelse’s single, bust and half-length figures were 16th-century Venetian depictions of courtesans.6 Of the approximately 15 shepherdesses painted by Moreelse, the Rijksmuseum painting is the most famous and the most often copied.7 A monogrammed replica from 1633 now in Princeton8 is considered to be a product of Moreelse’s studio by Domela Nieuwenhuis.9 The Rijksmuseum shepherdess is of the more slender, elegant type Moreelse developed in the mid-1620s.10 In those depictions as well, the figure is set somewhat further back from the picture plane and leans slightly toward the viewer, whom she engages with a come-hither look. The voluminous quality of the figure in the present painting is enhanced by the undifferentiated dark background and the yellow cloak in which she is enveloped. Unlike his other depictions of shepherdesses, the figure in the Rijksmuseum painting wears a veil instead of a straw hat or beret. The colouring and the lighting are also much more subtle than in the other comparable works. Some of Moreelse’s single-figure shepherdesses originally had male counterparts; it is known, for example, that the States of Utrecht gave a pair of paintings by Moreelse showing a shepherd and a shepherdess to Amalia van Solms in 1627.11 It is therefore possible that the Rijksmuseum Shepherdess also had a male pendant originally. The Rijksmuseum painting was first given the nickname ‘The beautiful shepherdess’ (De schone herderin) in print in the 1858 catalogue of the museum’s collection. 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. 220.