Annunciation to the Shepherds

David Vinckboons was born in Mechelen, in the Southern Netherlands, but like many other Protestants he moved to the North to seek religious freedom and escape the heavy-handed restrictions the Spanish rulers of the South imposed on the population. Vinckboons settled in Amsterdam and was a prolific and popular painter and draftsman. His compositions are the basis of more prints than any other artist of the early seventeenth century.


The Annunciation to the Shepherds is one of only three prints he made himself. A preliminary drawing in reverse, dated 1604, is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. It is indented with a stylus, a method used to transfer a drawn design to a copper etching plate. The subject, which is briefly described in Luke 2:8-14, was very common in the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the Bible the single angel, joined by a chorus of heavenly figures, appears to a group of shepherds in the field and tells them of the birth of Christ. Most of contemporary representations follow that description, but Vinckboons preferred to show just a single angel holding a banderol. His shepherds, an unusually rough looking group, and their animals are astonished by the miraculous appearance.


The delicate and irregular fine lines of hatching and cross-hatching reveal the hand of a draftsman rather than a professional printmaker. The present example is one of just three known impressions of this print.