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Landscape with Bathing Nudes

Creator

Dutch Artist · 1594–1595

Cornelis van Poelenburgh was a founder of Dutch Italianate landscape painting. He studied under the Utrecht Mannerist Abraham Bloemaert, but his years in Rome, from 1617 to 1625, were more decisive for his development. An early member of the *schildersbent,* the club for Rome's Netherlandish painters, he was nicknamed "Satyr." In Rome, a friend noted that Poelenburgh "exerted himself to the utmost

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Date: about 1640–1650
Medium: Oil on copper
Culture: Dutch
Department: Paintings
Institution: Getty Museum

A sense of uninhibited freedom pervades the scene as a group of women bathe, lounge, and socialize in an area below a rocky hillside. Drying herself, the woman in the center of the painting turns toward her voluptuous nude companion lying in the foreground. Cornelius van Poelenburgh softly modeled the figures, evoking the texture of tender flesh. The landscape captures the atmospheric qualities of the Italian countryside and deliberately calls to mind an idyllic mythological land filled with languid nymphs. Van Poelenburgh was best known for cabinet-size paintings, small easel paintings intended to be viewed at close range. Like this one, many were painted on copper and represented ruins, shepherds, peasants, travelers, and an occasional mythological or religious scene.

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