This Discovery of Moses is one of only two known paintings by Du Gardijn executed directly on panel.2 Both are history paintings.3 The rather unaccomplished figures in the present painting show the influence of Lastman and Jacob Pynas, as do such motifs as the umbrella in the centre of the composition and the acanthus at the lower right. The landscape has little in common with Du Gardijn’s works on paper that include landscape elements. The short strokes, many of them white highlights on the trees at the right of the picture, however, are also found, and to a much greater degree, in a very strange anthropomorphic landscape executed by Du Gardijn now in Alkmaar.4 This stylistic feature may also have been derived from the work of Jacob Pynas.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 76.