Nudes in a Landscape (possibly Diana and Callisto) (c. 1642–67): Art, History and Details

Nudes in a Landscape (possibly Diana and Callisto) (c. 1642–67) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Cornelis van Poelenburch (Dutch, 1594/95–1667).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In this drawing, the Amsterdam painter Cornelis van Poelenburch combined a loose, monochromatic ink wash landscape with red chalk figures in the foreground. The figures depict the story of Diana and Callisto, when Callisto’s pregnancy with Jupiter's child is revealed to the chaste goddess of the hunt Diana. Van Poelenburch began to draw with red chalk during a journey to Italy, where it was a more common artist’s medium than in the Netherlands. Back in Amsterdam, he kept red chalk as part of his practice, perhaps to call attention to his Italian sojourn.

Object facts

• Title: Nudes in a Landscape (possibly Diana and Callisto)
• Date: c. 1642–67
• Creator attribution: Cornelis van Poelenburch (Dutch, 1594/95–1667)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black ink wash over graphite, and red chalk on cream antique laid paper
• Dimensions: Support: 25.7 x 33.3 x 0.3 cm (10 1/8 x 13 1/8 x 1/8 in.); Image: 19.5 x 25.3 cm (7 11/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Dutch
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2019.11

A detail from the museum

The artist first drew the figures in red chalk and then meticulously filled in the ink wash landscape around them.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sluijter-Seiffer, Nicolette Sluijter-Seijffert. Cornelis van Poelenburch 1594/5-1667. The Paintings. John Benjamins Publishing company, from the series Studies in the Arts of the Low Countries, Vol. 15, 2016

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.