Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ to the Shepherds by Govert Flinck

Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ to the Shepherds by Govert Flinck (1639)

The night watches

Luke's Gospel tells how there were "shepherds watching, and keeping the night watches over their flock. And behold an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the brightness of God shone round about them; and they feared with a great fear" (Luke 2:8–9, Douay-Rheims). The angel tells them of the birth in Bethlehem, and "suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God" (2:13).

Flinck paints both at once: the single angel who speaks, and the crowd of heaven around him.

Heaven opens

In the upper left of the picture the night sky has broken open. Rays of light slant down from a bright gap in the clouds, and in the middle of them stands the angel, in a long white robe with wings raised, on a bank of cloud. One arm reaches out and down towards the shepherds; the other hand is lifted. Around him the sky is full of figures: small winged children tumbling head over heels, some linked hand in hand below his feet, and larger angels in groups to either side, one on the right with his hands joined in prayer. The rest of the sky is heavy, dark cloud.

The shepherds

The lower half of the picture is in shadow except where the light from above falls on the ground. On the left the flock is crowded together: sheep, goats, rams with curled horns and a cow seen from behind. Among them a young herdsman leans on his staff with his hands clasped, looking straight up with his mouth open.

On the right, under a palm tree and the dark trees of a bank, the others are grouped by a rough fence and a wooden cart. A woman in a headcloth kneels with her hand to her face, looking up. Behind her a man joins his hands; another raises an open hand as if to shield himself. An old man in a red cap turns towards the light. One shepherd has not woken at all: he sits slumped with his head on his arm. Further back a woman holds a small child, and other faces look out of the dark. In the foreground a black-and-white dog stands in the patch of light, beside a sheep lying on the ground, a basket and a wooden bucket. Far off in the middle distance the dark land runs back to faint hills.

Flinck and Rembrandt

Govert Flinck was born in Kleve in 1615 and trained first with Lambert Jacobsz in Leeuwarden. In Amsterdam he became one of Rembrandt's pupils and lived in the house of the dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, for whom, the Louvre notes, he worked from 1634. From about 1636 to 1648 he painted in Rembrandt's manner; later he turned towards the fuller forms of Rubens and to large civic commissions in Amsterdam. He died there in 1660.

This canvas belongs to the Rembrandt years. The Louvre describes it as strongly inspired by Rembrandt's etching of the same subject, made in 1634 in an upright format, and turned here into a broad landscape. It is signed and dated G. Flinck f. 1639.

From Amsterdam to Paris

The Louvre records that the picture was with Uylenburgh in Amsterdam, identified through the early writers Baldinucci and Sandrart. In the eighteenth century it passed to Louis-Bernard Coclers of Liège, a painter and dealer in Amsterdam, and in 1797 the French state acquired it from him in exchange for nine Flemish paintings seized from émigrés. It is oil on canvas, 160 by 196 centimetres, catalogued as INV 1291, and hangs in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre. A restoration was published in the journal Technè in 2012.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole canvas, in its wide format, from the burst of light at the upper left to the sleeping shepherd and the dog at the lower right.

Sources: Musée du Louvre, Paris, INV 1291 · Wikidata Q27513965 · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia, "Govert Flinck" · Luke 2:8–15 (Douay-Rheims)