POELENBURGH, Cornelis van

In the 1620s and 1630s, Dutch aristocrats furthered a new vogue for particular kinds of history and portrait painting, of ‘pastoral’ scenes involving the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses in lush, idealized landscapes. In 1635, four painters made a series of pastoral paintings for the Stadhouder’s court, chronicling the popular story of Amarillis and Mirtillo, based on the pastoral play Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd) by the Italian poet Giovan Battista Guarini (1538-1612). The series included paintings by Dirk van der Lisse and Cornelis Saftleven.

Cornelis van Poelenburgh offsets the gruesome nature of Lawrence’s martyrdom by setting the scene within an idyllic and romanticised view of Rome. The statues of Castor and Pollux are visible on the Capitoline Hill, as is part of St. Peter’s Basilica to the left, and the Colosseum in the centre. Despite the idyllic landscapes however, the focus remains on the grisly martyrdom.

In addition to Italianate landscapes, Poelenburgh made also portraits, some in Italianate landscapes. A good example of this is the portrait of the children of Frederick, King of Bohemia.

The largest boy and girl are in the role of Meleagros and Atalante, respectively. The ruins in the background represent a motif characteristic of the artist’s landscapes, while the hilly landscape on the right side shows the influence of Italian landscape painting.

There are several copies of this painting in different European museums.

Poelenburgh’s Italian drawings from the first half of the 1620s are characterized by a lavish use of the brush in dark brown ink and close attention to the rendering of light and shade.

This is one of the typical Italianate landscapes Van Poelenburgh produced in Utrecht after his return from Rome in 1627.

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This painting focuses almost wholly on the figures themselves in spite of the beautiful, architectural landscape in which they are set. Van Poelenburgh brings them to life with his use of a rich colour palette and by composing the respective groups in such a way as to create energetic flowing brushwork.

This picture, which belongs to Poelenburgh’s later career, still shows the powerful influence of his Italian experience. Roman ruins never disappeared from his paintings even decades after he had returned to Utrecht.

Ovid (Met. 2:708-832) tells how three sisters, returning from the festival of Minerva and carrying her sacred baskets on their heads, were espied by Mercury who immediately fell in love with the most beautiful of them, Herse. Another of the sisters, Aglauros, was consumed with envy, and tried to prevent Mercury entering Herse’s chamber when he came to her one night. He touched Aglauros with his wand and she turned to black stone, the colour of her thoughts.

This painting depicts the scene when the maidens are walking outdoors, Mercury flying above them. In the background is Minerva’s temple. The small painting was formerly attributed to Bartholomeus Breenbergh, a contemporary of Poelenburgh. Breenbergh’s art resembles that of his peer in many respects and at times the two are difficult to separate.

When van Poelenburgh returned to Utrecht from Italy in 1627, he elaborated an Italianate type of landscape which made him highly popular with northern painters and connoisseurs. His landscapes enlivened with bathing nymphs pursued by satyrs were particularly appreciated and imitated.

Predominantly a landscape painter, there are only a handful of known portraits attributed to Poelenburgh and it was not till after his return to Utrecht in 1627 that Poelenburgh started painting them.

Poelenburgh’s native town was Utrecht, and, like so many Italianate Dutch painters, he studied there with Bloemaert. During his life he achieved great fame, and he attracted a large number of followers who used his polished style for arcadian landscapes populated with the same satyrs and nude nymphs he favoured, although in their works the nymphs are usually more hefty. In Italy he enjoyed the patronage of leading Roman families and the Medici court in Florence. He settled in Utrecht after his return from the south and became a leading artist of the city. When Rubens, who owned several of his paintings, travelled to Utrecht in 1627 he visited his studio. In the same year, when the Province of Utrecht made an official wedding gift of four paintings to Amalia van Solms, bride of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, it included one of his, a Banquet of the Gods (the other paintings were an animal and bird picture by Roelandt Savery and pendants by Paulus Moreelse of a Shepherd and Shepherdess). Poelenburgh became a favourite of the court at The Hague and in 1637 he made the first of several trips to London where he worked for Charles I. His most adoring patron in Holland was Willem Vincent Baron van Wyttenhorst whose collection included fifty-five of his paintings.

Poelenburgh’s reputation as a leading representative of the first generation of Italianate artists rests securely on his meticulously finished paintings, usually in cool colour harmonies, of biblical, mythological, historical, and pastoral subjects set in tranquil airy landscapes which make frequent use of classical ruins that help evoke a heroic past. In his Rest on the Flight into Egypt the conspicuous foreground fragments of ancient sculpture and architectural remains probably allude to the impending demise of the pagan world and the imminent coming of the New Dispensation.

In 1620 and 1621, Poelenburgh worked at the court of Cosimo II de’ Medici, where he painted at least two series of small, brilliant paintings on copper.

The relief on the right represents the sacrifice of Marcus Aurelius.

For a time, Poelenburgh was based in Rome, where his nickname was “Satyr,” because this subject matter was one of his specialities. The mythological creatures’ elongated bodies and small heads - unusually, there appear to be lady satyrs - and the monstrous rock apparitions above them are in old-fashioned, Italian Mannerist style, while the long, sloping landscape is more northern.

This group of gods on the clouds illustrates a frequently depicted sentence by Terence: Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus - Without Ceres (bread) and Bacchus (wine) Venus freezes. In the painting there is an unusual reversal of distances between sky and earth, other examples of which can be found in Guido Reni’s and Giovanni Lanfranco’s paintings which Poelenburgh would have seen in Rome.

A similar composition by the artist is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

This picture, the earliest dated painting by Poelenburgh, shows the cattle market held on the Roman Forum. Between the ruins of ancient buildings are traders with their cattle and a woman doing the washing at a public fountain from which cattle also drink. The Castel Sant’Angelo is recognisable in the background (which is in fact not visible from the Roman Forum).