Benjamin Gerritsz. Cuyp

Born in Dordrecht, Benjamin Cuyp began his career as a painter in the 1630s and stayed in the city until his death in 1652. He worked in the prosperous context of the Dutch Golden Age, where a fast-expanding art market was fuelling extensive artistic production. He joined the Guild of St Luke in 1631 at the age of eighteen, thus facilitating his entry into this milieu and giving him access to a bourgeois clientele seeking paintings that were accessible in terms of both price and subject matter. The artist belonged to the illustrious Cuyp family which included his half-brother Jacob Gerritsz. (1594–1651) and his nephew Aelbert (1620–1691), the most famous of the three.

Cuyp’s work is often described as ‘Rembrandtesque’: a loose style, visible brushstrokes, a brown underlayer and strong chiaroscuro lighting demonstrate the master’s influence on his work, in both technical and aesthetic terms. These elements borrowed from Rembrandt are also apparent in this Adoration of the shepherds, where the only source of light comes from a shaft descending from a cloud surmounted by putti, subtly illuminating the crib in which the baby Jesus lies. Cows, sheep and shepherds crowd around, hidden in the shadows and keeping a distance from the Holy Family which seems as anxious as it is respectful. In the centre of the painting, two beams of wood in the shape of a cross in the background suggest the Passion which was to come.

This theme is one of Cuyp’s specialities. He repeated it in dozens of variants, certainly for commercial reasons. In his article of 1979, Ildikó Ember lists nearly thirty paintings of the Adoration of the shepherds out of about a hundred works with religious subjects, many in museums (see I. Ember, Benjamin Gerritsz. Cuyp (1612-1652), Acta Historiae Artium, Budapest, vol. XXV, 1979, pp. 89–141 and vol. XXVI, 1980, pp. 39–73). These various versions often share a similar composition, in which the celestial light shining on the scene both creates a sense of the sacred and underlines its intimacy.