Govert Flinck (1615-1660), Rembrandt as a Shepherd with a Staff and Flute, c. 1636, Oil on canvas, 75.1× 64.4cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on loan to Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp
Flinck’s father, a cloth merchant in the German town of Cleves, had no intention of raising a painter. The boy was apprenticed to a silk mercer, and the family’s Mennonite respectability pointed toward trade, not art. It took the intervention of Lambert Jacobsz (c. 1592–1637), a fellow Mennonite who was as much an itinerant preacher as he was a painter, to persuade the elder Flinck that his son’s instincts might be worth indulging. Around 1629–1630, the young Govert followed Jacobsz to Leeuwarden, where he trained alongside Jacob Adriaensz Backer (1608–1651), seven years his senior. By 1636 or perhaps a little earlier, Flinck had entered Rembrandt’s Amsterdam studio, lodging in the house of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh (c. 1587–1661), whose family connections to the master ran deep: Uylenburgh’s cousin Saskia (1612–1642) had married Rembrandt in 1634. Houbraken, ever ready to flatter, claimed Flinck mastered Rembrandt’s manner in a single year of study, though his earliest signed works from 1636 still carry visible traces of Jacobsz’s looser handling, which makes the claim feel generous.
This tronie, one of Flinck’s first independent compositions, shows a half-length male figure crowned with a laurel wreath, holding a flute and a shepherd’s crook, with an earring in his right ear. The physiognomy bears a striking resemblance to Rembrandt’s own features, particularly as recorded in an etching of 1630, and the identification of the sitter as the master himself has held since at least the eighteenth century. It is worth pausing over what this means. A pupil, still finding his way, paints his teacher in pastoral costume, wreathed in laurel, gazing outward with an expression that sits somewhere between self-possession and gentle amusement. Is this homage? Flattery? A studio exercise with a willing model who happened to be the most famous painter in Amsterdam? The tronie genre allows all of these readings and commits to none, which is perhaps the point.
The painting was conceived as one half of a pendant pair. Its companion, a Shepherdess dated 1636, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, is modelled closely on Rembrandt’s Flora of 1634 (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). Flinck borrowed the pose and costume from his teacher’s composition, including the placement of the woman’s left hand on her protruding abdomen, a conventional sign of nature’s fecundity, though he reduced the figure to half-length and gave her a crook rather than a floral staff. The pair appeared together in an Amsterdam sale of 1700, described simply as two tronies of a shepherd and shepherdess by Flinck, and were later recorded at Schloss Salzdahlum in the collection of August Wilhelm (1715–1781), Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern. During the Napoleonic upheavals, the pendants were separated. The Shepherdess eventually returned to Braunschweig; the Shepherd vanished from the record until it surfaced at a Frankfurt sale in 1920 and passed through several dealers before the Rijksmuseum acquired it in 1942 from Paul Brandt , a controversial wartime purchase whose provenance the museum has flagged for further scrutiny.
The traditional identification of the shepherdess as Saskia van Uylenburgh is persistent but doubtful. Comparison with the only secure likeness of Saskia, Rembrandt’s silverpoint drawing of 1633, does not support it, and was firmly rejected by Van den Brink in the 1993 catalogue for The Dreamland: Pastoral Painting in the Golden Age. The Rijksmuseum’s wall text continues to call her Saskia, which is a useful reminder that institutional labels can outlive the scholarship they were once based on. Regardless of whether Rembrandt or Saskia posed for these works, they were conceived as genre types within the well-established pastoral tradition, not as formal portraits.
That tradition had its Dutch roots in the 1620s, when Utrecht painters such as Abraham Bloemaert (1566–1651) and Paulus Moreelse (1571–1638) began producing pendant pairs of shepherds and shepherdesses, often with pronounced Italianate warmth and a fair amount of exposed flesh. By the mid-1630s, Amsterdam painters had taken up the mode, Backer among them. Flinck’s pair is strikingly chaste by comparison. His shepherd is fully clothed in a thick coat, painted in broad, slightly slack strokes of purplish-blue that recall Lambert Jacobsz’s manner more than Rembrandt’s. Even the shepherdess reveals none of the generous décolletage favoured by the Utrecht school. Whether this restraint reflects Flinck’s Mennonite sensibility, his personal temperament, or simply his reading of what the Amsterdam market wanted from a young painter still working within Uylenburgh’s orbit is an open question. In 1645, Flinck married Ingeltje Thoveling (d. 1651), the daughter of a vice-admiral and director of the Rotterdam branch of the Dutch East India Company, who belonged to the Remonstrant church. After her death, Flinck had himself baptised in her faith, leaving behind his Mennonite upbringing. By then he was a different painter altogether, pursuing a Flemish Baroque manner inspired by Rubens and receiving commissions from the Amsterdam patriciate, the Elector of Brandenburg, and Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), governor of Cleves. The quiet shepherd of 1636, still half-dressed in his first teacher’s style, belongs to a world Flinck would soon leave behind.
References
Bikker, J. (2023) ‘Govert Flinck, Shepherd, c. 1636′, in Bikker, J. (ed.) Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online collection catalogue. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.Available at:https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Rembrandt-as-a-Shepherd-with-a-Staff-and-Flute–54826461a78c38472d670ca1cdae78a4 (Accessed 27 May 2024)
Horn, H.J. and Van Leeuwen, R. (2021) Houbraken Translated: Arnold Houbraken’s Great Theatre of the Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses. RKD Studies. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: houbraken-translated.rkdstudies.nl ( Accessed 26 may 2024)
McNeil Kettering, A. (1983) The Dutch Arcadia: Pastoral Art and its Audience in the Golden Age. Montclair
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Van den Brink, P. (1993) in Van den Brink, P. and De Meyere, J. (eds.) Het gedroomde land: Pastorale schilderkunst in de Gouden Eeuw [The Dreamland: Pastoral Painting in the Golden Age], exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum)/Frankfurt (Schirn Kunsthalle)/Luxemburg (Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art), pp. 155–59
Von Moltke, J.W. (1965) Govaert Flinck, 1615–1660. Amsterdam