(Antwerp 1589-1626)
A wooded landscape with shepherds and their flock,
oil on canvas, 114 x 198 cm, framed

We are very grateful to Luuk Pijl for confirming the attribution in full and for his help in cataloguing the present painting. A certificate is available.

The son of an art dealer, Abraham Govaerts was born in Antwerp in 1589. It has been suggested that he trained in the workshop of Jan Brueghel the Elder, but there is no proof for this assumption. He is registered as a master in Antwerp’s Guild of Saint Luke from 1607–1608 onwards. He was married to Isabella Gielis, who died in 1626, a few days after her husband. The pair had two daughters named Isabella and Suzanna. Abraham Govaerts never worked outside his native Antwerp, where he became a deacon of the local Guild of Saint Luke in 1623. Several young masters received training from Govaerts, among them was the renowned landscape painter Alexander Keirincx, as well as the unknown Nicolaes Aertsens and Gysbrecht van der Berch. The lion share of Abraham Govaerts´s extant paintings are painted on small wooden or copper panels.

His oeuvre, as compiled by Ursula Härting and Kathleen Borms in 2003, consists of nearly 200 cabinet size landscape paintings. Only four of this corpus are rendered on large canvases, which are similar in size to the present painting (Ursula Härting and Kathleen Borms, Abraham Govaerts. Der Waldmaler (1589-1626), Leuven 2003, nos. 35, 159, 162, 192). The present painting shows identical stylistic features compared to these four large canvases which have been correctly catalogued as by Govaerts. The way that the gnarled tree trunks, the foliage, the grounds and the water is rendered is very similar indeed. Govaerts´s rendering of the herdsman reminds us of the way that the mythological figure of Argus is usually depicted with his shoulders downwards. However, no example of a representation of Argus without Mercury is known and therefore the identification of the herdsman as Argus is probably not correct.

None of the large canvases by Govaerts have been signed or dated by the master, which makes it difficult to date the present work. On stylistic grounds a date during the 1610s or the early 1620s seems most likely for the present large and impressive landscape.