Painting Detail
ShepherdessArtist: David Teniers II
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 58x52 cm
Date: 1650s
Genre: Genre Painting
Source: Yusupov Palace Museum, Leningrad, 1925
The Hermitage has one of the world's best collections of works by the Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger. This Shepherdess forms a pair to a Shepherd, also in the Hermitage, and both must have been produced during the artist's stay in Brussels, where he was court painter and keeper of the picture gallery to the ruler of the Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.
The young woman in her modest but elegant dress and velvet beret with a feather is shown with the attributes of a shepherdess, a staff and a tambourine. Her graceful pose, masquerade costume and somewhat coquettish glance anticipate the French 18th-century fetes galantes of Antoine Watteau and the pastorales of Francois Boucher. However, the realistic treatment of the landscape clearly indicates a strong link with the traditions of Flemish art. Teniers' painting skill can be seen not only in the treatment of texture in the fabrics and pearl necklace, but also in the elegant colour scheme, built up of fine gradations of warm golden-brown tones and cold silvery-blue and green.