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| A Young Woman as a Shepherdess ("Saskia as Flora") |
Artist:Govert Flinck (Dutch, Cleve 1615–1660 Amsterdam)
Medium:Oil on canvas, transferred from wood
Dimensions:Oval, 26 1/4 x 19 7/8 in. (66.7 x 50.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Bequest of Lillian S. Timken, 1959
Catalogue Entry
The painting was transferred from a wood panel to a canvas support in 1765, and its surface suffered in the process. In 1732, the work was listed in the estate inventory of Charles Jean Baptiste Fleuriau, comte de Morville, as one of "deux tetes de Rembrandt." Evidently the picture had been arbitrarily paired with a painting of a young woman by Rembrandt, probably his celebrated canvas A Girl at a Window of 1645 (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London). De Morville had been French ambassador at The Hague from 1718 until 1720 and was familiar with other important collectors of the day, including Valerius Rover in Delft and the Polish count Charles Henry d'Hoym in Paris. D'Hoym, a distinguished bibliophile as well as an amateur of paintings, apparently purchased this picture from de Morville's estate.
Rembrandt's name and the (for him) plausible date of 1633 swim in a suspicious pool of paint to the lower right. Until the picture was cleaned in 1995, the inscription, heavy overpainting, and varnish lent the work a surface and tonality that were considered typical of the master by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century connoisseurs. However, Martin (1921) cited the work as an example of genuinely signed Rembrandts among which non-autograph pictures may be found. Scholars such as Bredius (1935), Valentiner (1931), and Bauch (1966) maintained the attribution to Rembrandt, but Gerson (1969) referred to the picture's problematic condition and concluded that "even on the strength of what can be seen of the original paint, an attribution to Rembrandt is unjustified. Perhaps a work by G. Flinck."
The attribution to Flinck is so convincing and so widely accepted that it is reasonable to catalogue the work under his name rather than under "Style of Rembrandt." Sumowski (1983–[94?]), in assigning it to Flinck, compares the Saskia as Shepherdess formerly in the Harrach collection, Vienna, which has long been recognized as a Flinck painted in the manner of Rembrandt during the late 1630s, and the Young Shepherdess in a Window (Musée du Louvre, Paris), which is signed by Flinck and dated 1641. The Harrach painting, Flinck's Woman with a Turban and Veil of about 1636 (Devonshire collection, Chatsworth), his Woman with Feathered Hat and Veil (formerly Galerie Fischer, Lucerne), and The Met's picture are similar not only in execution and in exotic figure types but also in their derivation from Rembrandt, the most obvious known model being his Bust of a Young Woman ("Saskia") of about 1633 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), which depicts a veiled and bejeweled beauty with a straight nose, level lips, dark brows, and a direct gaze. At least two other Rembrandtesque Flincks should be compared with the New York painting, the Girl in Arcadian Dress with a Dog (Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo) and the Shepherdess in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, which is signed and dated 1636 and a pendant to the signed Rembrandt(?) as a Shepherd in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Finally, another oval painting—also once attributed to Rembrandt and identified as Saskia—the Young Shepherdess as Flora (Musée du Louvre, Paris), is convincingly ascribed to Flinck by Foucart (1988) and is strongly reminiscent of The Met’s picture.
In all these works, it is not only the execution but also the palette, the drawing of the faces, and the way shadows are used to model features such as the nose (especially the underside) and lips that may be considered typical of Flinck in the second half of the 1630s. Even when a figure by Rembrandt served as model, Flinck introduced his own peculiar type of physiognomy: heads in the shape of elongated ovals with flattened sides, slight, sloping shoulders, and a short, curving, almost amphibious forearm and hand. He is also fond of fussy flowers, and fabrics that make up for their lack of substance with a display of shimmering detail.
The title employed by The Met for a century, Saskia as Flora, is doubly mistaken. Any resemblance to Rembrandt's wife derives from the influence on this work of paintings by Rembrandt that depict an idealized type somewhat reminiscent of Saskia (much as Rubens's second wife, Helena Fourment, is recalled by his Venuses and other female figures of the 1630s). It is true that the figure here, crowned with a wreath of flowers, is similar to the goddess in Rembrandt's Flora of 1634 (Hermitage, St. Petersburg), but her costume points to pastoral occupations of the kind practiced by ladies of the Dutch court. As noted by Louttit (1973), exotic veils and striped silks, despite their look of Oriental opulence rather than rustic simplicity, were part of the pastoral mode in the 1630s. The genre flourished not only in painting and prints but also in the theatre, poetry, and other forms of literature.
Roscam Abbing (1999) reconstructed the painting's eighteenth-century provenance. It follows from this valuable information and from Gersaint’s (1747) description of the picture that the original support must have been a rectangular panel. Thus, the composition would have more closely resembled that of Rembrandt's Bust of a Young Woman ("Saskia") in Amsterdam, which appears originally to have been rectangular.
[2016; adapted from Liedtke 2007]
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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