A sleeping shepherd with two sheep, in a landscape

Govert Dircksz. Camphuysen was a versatile artist who is best known for paintings reminiscent of the work of Paulus Potter, of whom he was a contemporary. He also painted portraits, tavern and barn scenes and a wide range of still lifes. His oeuvre has only recently been reconstructed, as during the nineteenth century much of it was given to his father, Dirck Rafaelsz., who initially worked as a painter but gave up art to become a cleric and poet at the age of eighteen. It was only in 1860 that Willem Burger pointed out that Dirck Rafaelsz. could not, as was then generally supposed, have taught Potter, as he died two years after the younger artist was born. Only in 1903 did Ernst Moes and Abraham Bredius distinguish between the various members of the Camphuysen family. Govert, the younger of two brothers, spent more than ten years in Sweden. There he painted in the service of Queen Widow Maria Eleonora in Nyköping and subsequently was court painter to Queen Hedwig Eleonora in Stockholm before returning to Amsterdam in 1665.

While the sheep in this painting recall in some respects the work of Potter, the sleeping young boy suggests a different source of influence in Camphuysen’s work. His dirty feet look instead to Caravaggio and his followers in Utrecht. A thematically similar painting by Cornelis and Herman Saftleven, artists who spent at least a portion of their careers in Utrecht, depicting a sleeping hunter is in the collection of Maida and George Abrams, Boston (see Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2016, no. 69).