Shepherdess, known as ‘Monumental Conception of Humanity’

Matthijs Maris's Shepherdess, known as 'Monumental Conception of Humanity' (1887), exemplifies the Dutch painter's extraordinary late style — works that drift entirely from naturalism into dreamlike ambiguity, the figure barely emergent from the painted surface. By the 1880s Maris, living in London in increasing isolation, had developed a uniquely mystical approach in which his subjects — often solitary figures or children — take on the character of apparitions or memories rather than observed realities. The Rijksmuseum's collection includes this unusual work as evidence of the most radical direction taken within the Hague School tradition.

The shepherdess is barely differentiated from the atmospheric ground — Maris layers paint in a way that dissolves form into texture, the figure emerging and receding from the surface like a half-remembered image. His technique here has no parallel in contemporaneous Dutch painting, anticipating aspects of Symbolist and even abstract painterly dissolution.