The Adoration of the Shepherds, Pieter Codde, 1645 – (Pieter Jacobsz Codde) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Pieter Jacobsz Codde

Date: 1645

Size: 56 x 45 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

With the monogram on the crib, one would not immediately have associated this painting with Pieter Codde, who is known mainly as a genre painter and portraitist. Nevertheless, he did produce history paintings, and not on an incidental basis. His preference was for mythological subjects, followed by Old Testament scenes. Playter assumed that Codde began to concentrate on history painting around 1640,3 but the eulogy written by Elias Herckmans in 1627 on Codde’s painting of the fall of Tyre shows that he was already working in the genre in the 1620s.4 Apart from the present painting, only The Judgement of Paris of 16355 and Diana and her Nymphs of 16516 are dated. Codde’s earliest genre paintings recall the broad, narrative scenes of Pieter Lastman, but this Adoration of the Shepherds is closer to Rembrandt and his school. The fact that it was praised as an early work in the catalogue of the 1883 sale, before the discovery of the date at lower right,7 would have been due to the slight clumsiness in the figures here and there. There are no other known paintings of this subject by Codde.8 The Rijksmuseum painting may be identical with the ‘Karsnacht van Codde’ (Christmas night by Codde) listed in the bankruptcy inventory of Egbert Schutt of Amsterdam drawn up on 15 February 1666.9 Gerdien Wuestman, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 49.