The Children's Bath (1480/90): Artwork and History

The Children's Bath (1480/90) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Israhel van Meckenem the Younger German, c. 1440/45-1503.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Albrecht Dürer and Sebald Beham likely knew Israhel van Meckenem’s earlier genre scene of seven children bathing, misbehaving, and playing around a large wooden tub, supervised by a bathmaid. Those artists’ related prints (Dürer's The Men’s Bath, 2009.133 and Beham's The Women’s Bath, 2010.518) take place in outdoor male and indoor female baths, respectively. All three celebrate different aspects of bathing culture, a relatively infrequent activity during the Renaissance. Though it has not been annotated in this impression, the empty, winding banner above Meckenem’s Children’s Bath offers the viewer a space to interact with the image as playfully as the splashing and roughhousing boys themselves.

Object facts

• Title: The Children's Bath
• Date: 1480/90
• Artist attribution: Israhel van Meckenem the Younger German, c. 1440/45-1503
• Place of origin: Germany
• Medium: Engraving in black on cream laid paper
• Dimensions: Image/sheet: 10.9 × 13.7 cm (4 5/16 × 5 7/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.846

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.