Lot 2019 Dα

Hendrick De Clerck belonged to the late Mannerist generation of artists preceding Peter Paul Rubens and the Flemish Baroque; his output was strongly influenced by his contemporary Marten de Vos, of whom he was a pupil. Following the iconoclastic outbreaks of 1556, the artist was often commissioned new altarpieces for churches in and around Brussels, for which he adopted the clear visual language common in post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation art; he kept faithful to this style despite continuing to work through the early decades of the seventeenth-century, when the Baroque language was in full bloom.
The present painting relates to other pieces of the same subject, which the artist visited often in this career: If a strong reference to the northern mannerism is clearly detectable, figures such as the bowing shepherd and the child blowing on the fire, refer to the Italian 16th century figurative culture (particularly evident is the reference to Bassano´s œuvre), which he learned during his Roman stay.