London, Alfred Brod Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, October-November 1956, no. 26
London, Colnaghi, Paintings by Old Masters, 24 April-25 May 1957, no. 27
Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, Ideal and Classical Landscape, 6 February-3 April 1960, no. 52
Southampton, City Museum and Art Gallery, on loan, 1965

ENGRAVED
In reverse by B. A. Dunker, Recueil d’Estampes Gravées d’après les Tableaux du Cabinet de Monseigneur le Duc de Choiseul, published by Basan, 1771, no. 34. 

Cornelis van Poelenburgh (or Poelenburch) was a leading representative of the first generation of Dutch artists who drew their inspiration from the landscape and culture of Italy.  He was born in Utrecht in the winter of 1594-95, and trained there with Abraham Bloemaert (1564-1651).  Like a number of other young artists from Utrecht – a city that had long-standing ties to Rome – he completed his education with a trip to Italy to see at first hand the achievements of antiquity and the Renaissance.  Poelenburgh arrived in Rome around 1617 and remained there for about eight years.  During his stay, he became one of the founder-members of the society of Northern artists in Rome known as the Bentvueghels (birds of a feather), and received commissions from leading Roman families and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de’ Medici.  Poelenburgh returned to his birthplace around 1626, and apart from a few years working at the English court of King Charles I, he spent the remainder of his career in Utrecht.

The sojourn in Italy was crucial for Poelenburgh’s development.  During his time there, he made drawings of Rome and its environs, ruins and monuments, and assimilated a wide variety of influences.  He became an associate of the influential Flemish landscapist Paul Bril (1553/54-1626), who had been working in Rome since 1582, and was exposed to the  landscapes of the German Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) and his Italian contemporaries, Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), and Filippo Napoletano (c. 1587-1629).  According to Joachim von Sandrart, Poelenburgh strove to model his figures on those of Raphael (1483-1520)[i]. 

While in Italy Poelenburgh began to paint small-scale views, on copper or panel, of the landscape around Rome, embellished with classical ruins, and rendered in clear, bright colours and limpid light.  These serve as the setting for biblical, mythological and pastoral scenes.  Judging from the Italian works, the essential features of Poelenburgh’s style were established early in his career.  Already the paintings of the early to mid-1620s display an idealised vision of the Italian landscape and a flawless technique - velvety smooth brushwork, refined observation of light and an incomparable rendering of spatial depth. 

By the time Poelenburgh returned to Utrecht, around 1626, he was already becoming well known.  Soon after, in 1627, his depiction of the Wedding Banquet of the Gods[ii] was chosen by the States of Utrecht as a gift for Amalia van Solms, wife of the Dutch Stadholder Frederik Hendrik.  Back in the Netherlands, Poelenburgh continued working in the style he had developed in Italy, painting numerous variations on a limited number of themes. For the rest of his career his work remained highly sought after both by courtly patrons and private collectors in Utrecht and beyond.  His most devoted patron was the Utrecht Maecenas Willem Vincent, Baron Wyttenhorst, whose inventory of paintings included 55 of his paintings. 

Poelenburgh’s depiction of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt belongs to a long pictorial tradition.  Surprisingly, this well-known episode is not described in the Bible.  Matthew (2:13-15) tells us only that having been warned by an angel that King Herod had ordered the killing of all the male children in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph fled in haste to Egypt with the infant Jesus.  The picturesque incident of the family pausing to rest developed later as one of the embellishments of the tale.  Poelenburgh painted no less than ten representations of The Flight into Egypt, each of them different in conception, making it his favourite subject.  The frequency with which he painted it no doubt reflects the demand for paintings of this theme.  Indeed, we know that Baron von Wyttenhorst paid him 200 guilders for a depiction of The Flight in 1657. 

In this impeccably preserved painting, Poelenburgh set the scene in the Roman campagna, amid the ruins of antiquity, in evocation of the distant past.  Substantial ruins rise up on the right and the left, while the left foreground is strewn with the fragments of buildings.  A central vista affords far-reaching views to distant hilltop towns and hazy blue mountains.  The Holy Family appears in the right foreground, sitting quietly on a grassy bank, a bundle of their belongings and the donkey’s saddle resting on the ground nearby.  The playful infant Jesus is tenderly portrayed seated on his father’s lap.  In the middle distance, herdsmen tend their flocks and peasant woman go about their everyday chores: one rinses clothes in a tank of water, while another hangs out washing on a line.  The presence of strangers, however, has not gone unnoticed by some of the locals, who point enquiringly at the donkey standing to one side. 

The present painting is signed with Poelenburgh’s characteristic monogram, but, like most of his works, it is undated.  Opinions as to its date vary, but it has proved difficult to construct a reliable chronology for Poelenburgh’s later oeuvre as he only dated a very few of his paintings.  Furthermore, his style did not change substantially after his return from Rome.  Sutton closely compared our painting to Poelenburgh’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, in the Fogg Art Museum, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he dates to circa 1630s-1640s, while Susan Donahoe regarded it as an early painting from his Roman years[iii].  In her scholarly monograph on the painter, Sluijter-Seijffert, like Sutton, compares our painting to the Fogg Art Museum picture, which she dates to the late 1630s[iv].  Sluijter-Seijffert also comments upon the highly unusual representation of the Christ child seated on his father’s lap, rather than his mother’s, which she suggests is a response to the Counter Reformation, when there arose a new devotion for Joseph, who came to be regarded more as a saint in his own right[v].

The reputation of Poelenburgh, and that of other Dutch Italianate landscape painters, remained undimmed long after they had passed away.  Their popularity is shown by the apparently insatiable demand for their paintings by collectors throughout Europe in the later seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Indeed, their works were often held in higher regard than those of Dutch painters who chose to depict their native Dutch countryside.  Writing in the early eighteenth century, Houbraken observed that “the century of Poelenburgh respects only those artists who have seen Rome”[vi].  This remained true in late-eighteenth-century France, where classicist ideals were in the ascendancy, and the sensibilites of cultivated collectors chimed with a vision of the warm south and the intellectual references to the lost world of antiquity.  The high esteem in which Poelenburg was held at this time is reflected in the provenance of our painting which shows that it once belonged to the wealthy French aristocrat, Etienne-François, Duc de Choiseul, who amassed one of the most important collections of his day.  From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the renown of Italianising painters began to wane, as critical favour inclined towards realist schools of painting, and it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that there was a reversal in their fortunes.  Since then, the publication of a number of monographs on individual artists, as well as exhibitions devoted to the work of Dutch Italianate artists, has reinvigorated interest in this particular strand of Dutch painting and brought a renewed appreciation of the valuable contribution made by these artists to the art of the Dutch Golden Age.

BIOGRAPHY

The son of Simon van Poelenburgh, a Roman Catholic Canon of Utrecht cathedral, Cornelis van Poelenburgh was born in Utrecht either in late 1594, or early in 1595.  According to the artist’s early biographers, Joachim von Sandrart[vii] and Arnold Houbraken[viii], he studied with Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651) in Utrecht.  By 1617, he was in Rome, where he contributed a poem to the album amicorum of the Dutch painter Wybrand de Geest (1592-1661).  From 1621-1622, Poelenburgh worked at the court of Cosimo II de’ Medici in Florence.  The 1638 inventory of Cosimo’s collection mentions four of Poelenburgh’s paintings hanging in the duke’s bedroom.  Poelenburgh was back in Rome by 1623, where he is documented as a founding member of the Schildersbent (artists’ clique), the fellowship of Dutch and Flemish artists in Rome known as the Bentvueghels (‘birds of a feather’): he was given the nickname “Satiro” (Satyr) by his fellow artists in the Bent.  In Rome, he worked for many of the leading families, including the Orsini, Giustiniani, Colonna and Patrizi.  He remained in the Eternal City until about 1625 or 1626 when he returned to Utrecht.  In the spring of 1627, the States of Utrecht purchased his Wedding Banquet of the Gods[ix] as a gift for the stadholder’s consort, Amalia van Solms.  A few months later, Rubens went to Poelenburgh’s studio while on a visit to Utrecht and, according to Joachim von Sandrart, liked his work so much that he ordered several paintings[x].  On 30 May 1629, Poelenburgh married Jacomina van Steenre, the daughter of a notary and clerk of the Court of Utrecht, who was like himself a Roman Catholic: the couple had four children.  In 1637, Cornelis was appointed court painter to King Charles I of England.  Between 1637 and 1641, he resided intermittently in London.  The rent on his house was paid by the King and he also received an allowance.  By the beginning of 1642, Poelenburgh was back in Utrecht, where he had inherited two large houses on the Oudmunsterkerkhof from his father-in-law.  He now had sufficient space to house a large studio, where he employed many pupils.  He was elected to the Guild of St. Luke and served as hoofdman in 1656 and as deken in 1657-58 and 1664.  He remained in Utrecht for the rest of his life.  He died in Utrecht in August 1667 and was buried in the city’s Magdalenakerk[xi]. 

Cornelis van Poelenbergh was one of the most successful and influential Utrecht painters of his time.  He painted history, mythological and religious subjects as well as pastoral landscapes and a number of portraits.  He occasionally collaborated with colleagues, adding figures to the landscapes of Jan Both (c. 1615-1652) and Alexander Keirinckx (1600-1652), the marine paintings of Adam Willaerts (1577-1664) and to the church interiors of Bartholomeus van Bassen (1590-1652) and Dirk van Delen (1605-1671). He was also a popular teacher, numbering among his many pupils, Dirck van der Lissse (1607-1669), Daniel Vertangen (1600-1681/84) and Johan van Haensbergen (1642-1705).  The artist received numerous commissions from aristocratic patrons including the Elector Palatine Frederik V and his consort Elizabeth Stuart (the ‘Winter King and Queen’), and the Dutch Stadholder Prince Frederik Hendrik and his wife Amalia van Solms.  His greatest admirer in Holland was Willem Vincent Baron van Wyttenhorst whose collection included 55 of his paintings.