Bathing Men, Cornelis van Poelenburch, after c. 1646 – (Cornelis Van Poelenburch) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Cornelis Van Poelenburch

Date: 1646

Size: 14 x 17 cm

Technique: Oil On Copper

Although the earliest known provenance of this painting, the manuscript sale catalogue of the estate of the dealer Jaques Meyers in 1722, gives a detailed description of it as ‘a landscape with three men and an old lady’, for a long time afterwards there was some confusion about the sex of the bathers. This resulted in it being impossible to tell it apart from the Bathing Girls (SK-A-311) throughout most of the 19th century. However, this is not surprising as most cabinet pieces by Van Poelenburch are of bathing women sometimes in the company of men. Compositions with exclusively male bathers are rare. Other than this small copper there is a somewhat larger panel in Kassel, in which a similar rocky hill confines the composition on the left, and another, formerly in Dresden.10 Since the Rijksmuseum bought the Kabinet Van Heteren Gevers in 1809, the Bathing Men has been considered the pendant of the Bathing Girls.11 They may well have already been paired in the collection of Jaques Meyers in the early 18th century. It is likely that they where amongst the 65 small paintings by Van Poelenburch that hung in a small room on the first floor of his house, as described in the 1721 inventory of his estate.12 Furthermore, they were sold as consecutive lots at the auction held at Meyers’s premises a year later.13 It is, however, most unlikely that the two small pictures of bathers were conceived as pendants by the artist, as one is on copper and the other on panel. Furthermore, as already noted by Sluijter-Seijffert, they are not necessarily pendants in the true sense of the word, because their compositions are not mirrored as one would expect with companion pieces. The likely date for this picture is similar to that of the Bathing Girls. Taco Dibbits, 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. 244.