Shepherds and Sheep

?John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire (until d. 1722); the Dukes of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace (by 1740–1883; cat., 1862, no. 151); George Charles Spencer-Churchill, 8th Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace (1883–86; his sale, Christie's, London, July 24 and 26, 1886, no. 148); Henry G. Marquand, New York (until 1889)

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Exhibition of 1888–89," 1888–89, no. 27 (as "Copy of Bassano").

George Scharf. Catalogue Raisonné; or, A List of the Pictures in Blenheim Palace. London, 1862, vol. 1, p. 162, no. 151.

W. Bode. "Alte Kunstwerke in den Sammlungen der Vereinigten Staaten." Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, n.s., 6, no. 1 (1895), p. 17.

Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 94.

Walter A. Liedtke. Flemish Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 260–61; vol. 2, pl. 99.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 291, ill., as "Shepherds and Sheep".

This picture and The Met 89.15.25 are copies of paintings that were in the collection of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Netherlands from 1646 to 1656. The present whereabouts of Bassano's Shepherds and Sheep is unknown, but it appears in at least three of Teniers's paintings of the archduke's gallery. Teniers evidently completed the extensive series of small copies, to which the two in the Museum belong, in October 1656. They served as models for the engraved plates of Teniers's Theatrum Pictorum (Antwerp, 1658), a catalogue of 229 Italian pictures in the archduke's collection. Nearly half of the panels, including both in the Museum, probably were acquired by John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and George Vertue noted them as at Blenheim Palace in 1740 [notebook entry published in "Vertue Note Books Volume V," Walpole Society 26 (1937–38), p. 135]. The picture was engraved by Quirin Boel and published in Schilder-thooneel van David Teniers, Brussels, 1660.