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This is the earliest extant portrait by van den Eeckhout. The painter had a clear preference for history paintings and portraits such as this are relatively rare in his oeuvre.
The sitter is presented here as Daifilo, a shepherd who was one of the young lovers in Granida, a pastoral play by Pieter Cornelisz Hooft (c. 1605). Granida was the first pastoral play in the Dutch language, a fact which may explain its enduring popularity throughout the seventeenth century. Van den Eechkout himself painted a number of works on the theme.
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