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拍品專文
This humorous painting, which was only rediscovered in recent decades, is a masterpiece within the oeuvre of the Italianate landscapist Jan Baptist Weenix, who spent four formative years in Italy. The buildings in the background here probably derive from monuments like the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius and the Castel Sant’Angelo that Weenix would have encountered while in Italy. Upon his return to the Netherlands in the second half of the 1640s, Weenix continued to stage his paintings within Italianate settings dotted with Roman ruins, signing them, as here, with the Italianised Gio[vanni] Batt[ist]a Weenix. In 1649, Weenix settled in Utrecht, where there was a ready market for such relatively large scale works with pastoral themes.
Despite their reputation for sobriety, a broad swath of Dutch artists, among them Frans van Mieris I and Jan Steen, included animals in their work to suggestively reference erotic acts. Here, an impish bearded peasant directs the attention of a young shepherdess to a billy goat mounting a nanny goat. Though she covers her eyes in an attempt at modesty, she nevertheless peeps through her spread fingers to catch a glimpse of the amorous detail. The young woman’s sexual desires are perhaps intimated as well through the foliage behind her. It has been convincingly argued that the imagery of a vine entwining a tree in Dutch painting recalls one of the Latin poet Catullus’s carmina in which this motif is likened to an eager bride ‘full of desire for the bridegroom’ (see D.R. Smith, ‘Courtesy and its discontents: Frans Hals’s “Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen”’, Oud Holland, C, 1986, p. 6).
The woman must have been based on a live model who travelled in the artist’s circle, for she appears in more than a dozen of Weenix’s paintings, always wearing the giant hat to shade her from the sun (see F.J. Duparc and L.L. Graif, Italian Recollections: Dutch Painters of the Golden Age, exhibition catalogue, Montreal, 1990, pp. 196-197). The painting may also have served as inspiration for a print subsequently included in the fourth volume of Jan Harmensz. Krul’s Pampiere wereld ofte wereldsche oeffeninge of 1681.
During its history, this painting has passed through many of the most important collections of Dutch paintings ever assembled. It first appears at the sale of the eminent collection formed by the merchant Cornelis van Lill held in Dordrecht in 1743, which also included paintings by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Steen and Frans van Mieris. It was subsequently in the collection of the French connoisseur Augustin Blondel de Gagny, housed at his hôtel particulier in the Place Vendôme, which also included a number of masterpieces that are today in the Louvre, including works by Sir Anthony van Dyck, Gabriel Metsu, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. It was probably in Blondel de Gagny’s collection that the painter and writer Jean-Baptiste Descamps first encountered the work, singling it out for praise as ‘un beau Paysage’ alongside comparable paintings by Weenix in the collections of Jean de Julienne, the Elector of the Palatinate, Willem Lormier and Gerrit Braamcamp (J.B. Descamps, La vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandois, II, Paris, 1754, p. 311). It was then in the famed Amsterdam collection of Hendrik van Eyl Sluyter and, later, that of Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch.
Despite their reputation for sobriety, a broad swath of Dutch artists, among them Frans van Mieris I and Jan Steen, included animals in their work to suggestively reference erotic acts. Here, an impish bearded peasant directs the attention of a young shepherdess to a billy goat mounting a nanny goat. Though she covers her eyes in an attempt at modesty, she nevertheless peeps through her spread fingers to catch a glimpse of the amorous detail. The young woman’s sexual desires are perhaps intimated as well through the foliage behind her. It has been convincingly argued that the imagery of a vine entwining a tree in Dutch painting recalls one of the Latin poet Catullus’s carmina in which this motif is likened to an eager bride ‘full of desire for the bridegroom’ (see D.R. Smith, ‘Courtesy and its discontents: Frans Hals’s “Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen”’, Oud Holland, C, 1986, p. 6).
The woman must have been based on a live model who travelled in the artist’s circle, for she appears in more than a dozen of Weenix’s paintings, always wearing the giant hat to shade her from the sun (see F.J. Duparc and L.L. Graif, Italian Recollections: Dutch Painters of the Golden Age, exhibition catalogue, Montreal, 1990, pp. 196-197). The painting may also have served as inspiration for a print subsequently included in the fourth volume of Jan Harmensz. Krul’s Pampiere wereld ofte wereldsche oeffeninge of 1681.
During its history, this painting has passed through many of the most important collections of Dutch paintings ever assembled. It first appears at the sale of the eminent collection formed by the merchant Cornelis van Lill held in Dordrecht in 1743, which also included paintings by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Steen and Frans van Mieris. It was subsequently in the collection of the French connoisseur Augustin Blondel de Gagny, housed at his hôtel particulier in the Place Vendôme, which also included a number of masterpieces that are today in the Louvre, including works by Sir Anthony van Dyck, Gabriel Metsu, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. It was probably in Blondel de Gagny’s collection that the painter and writer Jean-Baptiste Descamps first encountered the work, singling it out for praise as ‘un beau Paysage’ alongside comparable paintings by Weenix in the collections of Jean de Julienne, the Elector of the Palatinate, Willem Lormier and Gerrit Braamcamp (J.B. Descamps, La vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandois, II, Paris, 1754, p. 311). It was then in the famed Amsterdam collection of Hendrik van Eyl Sluyter and, later, that of Napoleon’s uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch.