A young shepherdess, half length, in decolleté dress

Willem Bartel van der Kooi was the most important genre and portrait painter of Friesland in the first half of the 19th century. The present lot is one of his earliest dated works and is after the picture by Paulus Moreelse in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht engraved by M. Blot (1753-1818), (see J. Lauwerts, "Bij een schilderij van Paulus Moreelse" in Oud Holland, LIII, 1936, pp.159/60). The loose brush work and the expression of the girl's face shows that Van der Kooi has transformed the prototype into a figure that he would later use as a motif in his genre paintings, for instance in the Suckling Mother in the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (C. Boschma, Willem Bartel van der Kooi en het tekenonderwijs in Friesland, 1978, p.296, n0 E254 ill.) and A Mother Joy, signed and dated 1818, also in the Fries Museum, on loan from the Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (C. Boschma, op.cit., p.295, n0 251 ill.).