Bathing Men

after c. 1646

Object data

oil on copper

support: height 14 cm × width 17 cm

Inscriptions

monogram, lower left: C·P·

Technical notes

The support is a thin copper plate attached to what is probably an 18th-century bevelled oak panel. The opaque paint was applied smoothly over an even white ground, with some light brushwork visible in the sky. It is transparent in the dark browns of the rocks on the left, and in the foreground.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 5 December 2002

Condition

Good. There is slight discolouring in the foliage of the trees. A scratch caused by vandalism similar to that on SK-A-311 runs over the central figure; its retouching has discoloured.

Conservation

H.H. Mertens, 1967: complete restoration

Provenance

…; sale, Jaques Meyers (?-1721), Rotterdam, sold on the deceased’s premises (auction house not known), 9 September 1722 sqq., no. 140 (‘Een Lantsch: met 3 mans, en een oude vrouw, dito grote [h: 5 ½ d. b: 6 ½ d.] [14.4 x 16.9 cm]’), fl. 31, to Hendrik van Heteren (1672-1749), The Hague;¹ his collection;² his son, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren (1724-1800), The Hague (‘Eenige badende Mans en Vrouwen, h. 5 en een half d., br. 6 en drie vierde d. [14.4 x 17.7 cm] K.’);³ his third cousin and godson, Adriaan Leonard van Heteren Gevers (1794-1866), Rotterdam, ? (‘Représentant des hommes et des femmes occupés à se baigner’), or ? (‘Pendant. Même sujet’);⁴ from whom, fl. 100,000, with 136 other paintings en bloc (known as the ‘Kabinet van Heteren Gevers’), to the museum, by decree of Louis Napoleon, King of Holland, and through the mediation of his father Dirk Cornelis Gevers (1763-1839), 8 June 1809⁵

Object number: SK-A-310

The artist

Cornelis van Poelenburch (Utrecht 1594/95 - Utrecht 1667)

Van Poelenburch’s date of birth can be established on the basis of a document dated 21 January 1601 stating that he was six years old at the time. He was the son of Simon van Poelenburch (d. 1596), a Roman Catholic canon of Utrecht Cathedral. According to Von Sandrart, Van Poelenburch trained with Abraham Bloemaert. By 1617 he was in Rome, where he signed a poem in the album amicorum of Wybrand de Geest. He was one of the founding members of the Schildersbent (Band of Painters) where he adopted the sobriquet ‘Satiro’, evidently bestowed on him because of the subjects of many of his pictures. Van Poelenburch’s earliest known works are two drawings dated 1619, which according to their inscription ‘te tievele’, were drawn in the Tiburtine hills.⁶ His first dated painting, the View of the Campo Vaccino is from 1620.⁷ According to Von Sandrart, Van Poelenburch was also in Florence, where he was employed by Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He is recorded in Rome in 1622, but it is not known how long he remained in Italy. On 6 April 1627 he is recorded for the first time back in Utrecht, where he negotiated the purchase of one of his pictures, the Banquet of the Gods, by the States of Utrecht.⁸ Two years later he married Jacomina van Steenre. According to an inscription on a drawing of the Bastille he was in Paris in 1631.⁹ He lived in London from 1637 to 1641, returning to Utrecht at least once in 1638. Later in his career he held prominent positions in the Utrecht Guild of St Luke (warden in 1656, dean in 1657-58 and 1664). He was buried in the city’s Magdalena Kerk on 12 August 1667.

Van Poelenburch received commissions from important patrons, amongst whom Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate, and Charles I of England. Together with Abraham Bloemaert, Herman Saftleven and Dirck van der Lisse, he worked on four scenes from Guarini’s Il pastor fido for Stadholder Frederik Hendrik at Honselaarsdijk (c. 1633), and Frederik Hendrik owned 12 paintings by him, the largest number by a single artist. His most important patron was fellow townsman Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst, for whom he painted at least 55 cabinet pieces.

Van Poelenburch is considered to be one of the first Italianate painters and his work had a profound influence on the generation that came after him. Throughout his career he painted cabinet pieces of Italianate landscapes with mythological or religious subjects, or populated with pastoral figures and bathers. Almost exclusively on copper or panel, their painted surfaces have a porcelain smoothness. Several portraits by his hand are known, also in a small format. On several occasions Van Poelenburch painted the figures in the work of other artists, such as Alexander Keirincx, Jan Both, Bartholomeus van Bassen, Dirck van Delen and Hendrik Steenwijck II.

Houbraken is the first to record Van Poelenburch’s pupils: Dirck van der Lisse (1607-69), Daniel Vertangen (1598-1681/84), Johan van Haensbergen (1642-1705), Toussaint Gelton (c. 1630-80), François Verwilt (c. 1620-91), Warnard van Rysen (c. 1625-after 1665) and the otherwise unknown Willem van Steenree. Their work is often so close to that of their master that it is hard to tell apart, particularly when signed with Van Poelenburch’s monogram. Jan Gerritsz van Bronckhorst (c. 1603-61) made a number of prints after Van Poelenburch’s designs.

Taco Dibbits, 2007

References
De Bie 1661, pp. 256-57; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 175; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 128-30; Sluijter-Seijffert 1984, pp. 25-36, 249-58 (documents); Bok 1985; Chong 1987, pp. 3-14; Schatborn in Amsterdam 2001, pp. 57-65; Boers 2004 (with transcribed inventory of the collection of Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst)

Entry

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 were 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.

Literature

Sluijter-Seijffert 1984, pp. 100, 238, no. 124; Verroen 1985, p. 48, no. 112

Collection catalogues

1809, pp. 54-55, no. 239 or 240; 1843, p. 46, no. 243 (‘in good condition’); 1853, p. 22, no. 216 (fl. 400) or no. 217 (fl. 1,000); 1858, p. 107, no. 238 (as Bathing Girls); 1880, p. 244, no. 271 (as Bathing Girls); 1887, p. 133, no. 1118; 1903, p. 211, no. 1891; 1934, p. 225, no. 1891; 1960, p. 243, no. 1891; 1976, p. 448, no. A 310; 2007, no. 244

Citation

T. Dibbits, 2007, 'Cornelis van Poelenburch, Bathing Men, after c. 1646', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20026053

(accessed 10 December 2025 08:21:56).