Pastoral portrait of a gentleman as a shepherd, with a young woman playing a lute, a dog and sheep, in a landscape

Probably a collaborative work, in which the landscape is in the style of Jacques d'Arthois, while the sheep and lutanist are reminiscent of Abraham Willemsens. The oeuvre of Jan Thomas, to whom is attributed the main protagonist, is not well defined; in 1654 he left Antwerp, where in circa 1640 he had become a master, to work in Germany. The costume of the lutanist dates from the latter part of the 1630s. Alison McNeil Kettering has traced the origins and popularity of pastoral portraits in the northern Netherlands in her The Dutch Arcadia of 1983.