Shepherdess and Shepherd with Sheep and Goats

Simon van der Does dated this picture in Roman numerals, MDCCXI, which is 1711, and wrote it with his name on the pedestal of a stone vase. He was about 58 that year. The subject is a shepherdess and a shepherd with their sheep and goats, an Arcadian idyll of the kind Dutch collectors had been buying for decades.

The canvas belonged to Gerrit van der Pot van Groeneveld, a Rotterdam collector. In 1808 it was bought for the Royal Museum in Amsterdam, the forerunner of the Rijksmuseum founded under King Louis Napoleon, and in 1825 the Mauritshuis obtained it from the Rijksmuseum in an exchange. It belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof.