Three shepherds playing a game of cards in a meadow landscape with ruins

Karel du Jardin is believed to have studied with the Haarlem Italianate landscapist Nicolaes Berchem, becoming, according to Arnold Houbraken, his most talented pupil. He may have traveled to Italy shortly thereafter but was certainly there in the mid-1670s, having joined the Bentveughels, a group of mostly Dutch and Flemish painters active in Rome, where he was given the nickname Bokkebaart (‘goatbeard’) on account of his facial hair. In or shortly before 1650, possibly on his return journey from Italy, he is recorded in Lyon and Paris before arriving back in Amsterdam in 1651. He was a versatile artist who produced portraits, history paintings and, most notably, Italianate genre scenes which secured his lasting fame.

Jennifer Kilian suggested that the present painting is among du Jardin’s earliest surviving works, dating it to the period circa 1647-50 (loc. cit.). Already in this early painting the hallmarks of du Jardin’s later style, when he responded in particular to Paulus Potter’s sensitive depictions of animals, are evident. The painting is also testament to du Jardin’s ability to evoke the languid mood and southern light of Italy. Beneath a brilliant blue sky with billowing clouds a pair of young shepherds play a game of cards, while a third looks over one player’s shoulder, possibly relaying information to the shepherd seen from behind. Goats, sheep and cows rest and graze along the other side of a dirt path. Classical ruins create a backdrop for the scene, which is framed by a column with a sculpted bas relief along the painting’s left edge.

This painting has an especially storied provenance, having passed through a number of the most distinguished collections of Dutch paintings formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its first known owner was the wealthy Amsterdam distiller and timber merchant Gerrit Braamcamp, who built an exceptional collection that included some 380 paintings, with a particular interest in finely painted genre scenes by Gerrit Dou, Frans van Mieris I, Gabriel Metsu, Gerard ter Borch and Italianate landscape paintings. The present painting was prominently displayed in the ‘Groote Zijkamer’ (‘Large Side Room’) of Braamcamp’s house alongside thirty-two other paintings, including works by Potter, Philips Wouwerman, Metsu and Berchem. It is next documented in the possession of the Amsterdam merchant Pieter van Winter, whose collection of around 180 paintings included such masterpieces as Rembrandt’s full-length Portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and Louvre, Paris), Johannes Vermeer’s Village street (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and Jan Steen’s Girl eating oysters (Mauritshuis, The Hague). It subsequently passed into the hands of the Rothschild family, first in the collection of Baron Gustave de Rothschild in Paris and subsequently in that of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at Waddesdon Manor, in whose family it descended through the early decades of the twentieth century.