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.

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.

…; 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;¹¹Jonckheere 2005, p. 291, nos. 140-41. his collection;²²Moes/Van Biema 1909, p. 192. 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.’);³³Coll. cat. Van Heteren 1752, p. 458. 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’);⁴⁴Coll. cat. Gevers 1808, p. 149, no. 83 or 84. 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 1809⁵⁵Verroen 1985, p. 17, notes 2, 3.

Object number: SK-A-310

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.¹⁰¹⁰Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie; Sluijter-Seijffert 1984, p. 238, no. 127, p. 241, no. 146.

Since the Rijksmuseum bought the Kabinet Van Heteren Gevers in 1809, the Bathing Men has been considered the pendant of the Bathing Girls.¹¹¹¹The Dresden panel is equally considered to be one of a pair, the other one also depicting Bathing Girls; Sluijter-Seijffert 1984, pp. 100, 236, no. 114. 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.¹²¹²These pictures were owned jointly with Jan Frans Douven, court artist at Düsseldorf. According to Sluijter-Seijffert it is likely that the collection of Van Poelenburch paintings came from the artist’s maecenas, Willem Vincent van Wyttenhorst; Jonckheere 2005, p. 89. However, on the basis of the concise descriptions in Van Wyttenhorst’s inventory it is not possible to identify them in his collection; Boers 2004, p. 184, see pp. 216-18 for the transcribed inventory. Furthermore, they were sold as consecutive lots at the auction held at Meyers’s premises a year later.¹³¹³Although this is not entirely certain, the sale included no fewer than 36 cabinet pieces by Van Poelenburch, and there were seven other pictures of the same size with which the small Rijksmuseum picture could also have been paired: nos. 138-140, 142, 143, 147, 154. 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.

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

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

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