A Shepherdess, known as ‘The beautiful Shepherdess’

A young woman in the dress of a shepherdess holds her crook and wears flowers in her hair. She is not a real farm girl. By 1630, when Moreelse signed this with his monogram and the date at the top right, Dutch readers and theatregoers had fallen for Arcadia, the imagined land of lovesick shepherds from ancient poetry. The Amsterdam poet P. C. Hooft had put it on the Dutch stage with Granida, a play about a princess who falls in love with a shepherd, and painters in Utrecht answered with half-length shepherdesses like this one, to be hung at home and admired. The name The beautiful Shepherdess stuck to the picture. It belonged to Bernardus Ocke, a collector in Leiden, and at his sale on 21 April 1817 it was bought for the museum.