Shepherd with Flute (Self-Portrait?)

In the 1630s Dutch buyers had a taste for Arcadia. Pastoral poetry and plays were in fashion, and painters dressed ordinary faces as shepherds from an idealised countryside. Jacob Backer's shepherd belongs to that vogue, though it is a tronie, a study of a type, and no commissioned portrait. The man is wrapped in a sheepskin and crowned with ivy, and he has stopped playing his flute to look at us over his shoulder. The museum suspects Backer used his own face, hence the question mark in the title.

In places he let the ochre ground show through the paint, most clearly in the grey background. For nearly 200 years the panel stayed at Gavnø Castle in Denmark with the Thott family and their heirs, until a London sale in 1976. It belongs to the Mauritshuis, which bought it in 1977, and it hangs in the museum's second venue, the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague.