(Utrecht 1592–1656)
A young shepherdess with doves,
oil on canvas, 84 x 66 cm, framed

Provenance:
Hünerberg Collection sale, Brunswick, 14-15 September 1961, lot 102 (as Claude Audran);
Private collection, Belgium

Literature:
B. Nicolson, The International Caravaggesque Movement, Oxford 1979, pp. 61, 220, 225 (as a copy);
B. Nicolson/L.Vertova, Caravaggism in Europe, Turin 1990, vol. I, p.127, under cat. no. 1300 (as a copy);
J. R. Judson/R. E. O. Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst, 1592-1656, Dornspijk 1999, p. 163–164, under cat. no. 193 (no. 7, under copies)

The present painting is based on Honthorst’s work (circa 1625) in the Centraalmuseum, Utrecht.

Honthorst’s so called Arcadian subjects, to which group of paintings the present work belongs, follow in a tradition of idealised pastoral art, popular in the Renaissance due to the Latin poetry of Virgil. Virgil’s poetry drew on earlier Greek accounts of a virgin wilderness ruled by the god Pan in the Peloponnese. In a celebrated portrayal of the period, Queen Henrietta Maria of England was depicted by Honthorst as a shepherdess. Although the present composition, with its two doves in the girl’s hands, might appear to allude innocence, the revealing décolletage suggests that she is a courtesan, and it is more likely a reference rather to Venus’s sensuality and the sin of Luxuria, or lust.

Liesbeth Helmus compares the current picture with the existing fully-autograph prime version in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (inv. no. 6499) signed and dated 1652. Helmus notes that the details of the present picture look courser and less subtle than the Utrecht picture, but writes that the Shepherdess composition was in demand and so several versions may have been painted by Honthorst’s assistants, either in the master’s Utrecht workshorp or in his atelier in the Hague. Helmus further adds that, given the dates of Honthorst’s other works of this nature, there may be a lost original dating from circa 1622-1625, and that the Utrecht painting could thus be a repetition by Honthorst of this earlier work.

J. Richard Judson (see literature) thinks that that date on the Utrecht picture, while appearing genuine, may have been added thirty years later, either by the picture’s owner or a member of Honthorst’s studio. He lists the present work as a copy, one of a number of ‘seductive offerings symbolizing the sexual pleasures proffered by the young woman to the viewer […] exceptionally popular in Utrecht form the early 1620s through the 1630s and at the Court in The Hague in the late 30s and 40s’.