Nymphs Bathing

Dirck van der Lisse · c. 1650

Medium

Oil on copper

Original size

34.7 × 43.2 cm (13 5/8 × 17 in.); Framed: 58.4 × 66.7 × 6.4 cm (23 × 26 1/4 × 2 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Dirck van der Lisse's *Nymphs Bathing* is a jewel-like cabinet painting that draws the eye with its soft luminosity and intimate pastoral mood — figures caught mid-moment in a quiet, wooded landscape that feels suspended in golden afternoon light. Van der Lisse was a Dutch Golden Age painter deeply shaped by time in Rome, where he absorbed the Italianate tradition of small mythological scenes set against idyllic countryside. He worked closely in the manner of Cornelis van Poelenburch, and like his contemporaries, he favoured copper as a painting support — a material that rewards close looking, lending his flesh tones and foliage an almost porcelain clarity impossible to achieve on canvas. The choice of copper was no accident: its non-absorbent surface allowed seventeenth-century painters to build exceptionally fine detail and achieve the smooth, enamel-like finish that made cabinet paintings like this one prized collectibles among wealthy Dutch and Flemish patrons. Now held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the original continues to reward the same careful attention Van der Lisse clearly expected from his audience. Our hand-painted oil reproduction honours that intimacy — rendered on the same scale and with the same layered technique, it brings the warmth, delicacy, and quiet narrative of the original into your home with nothing lost in translation.