Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Colf players with an antique ruin. 1622

English, Nederlands

Nederlands

Colfspelers bij een antieke ruine (Colf players with an antique ruin). Pen and ink drawing with wash by Cornelis van Poelenburgh, 1622. 18,7 x 31,2 cm.

Two warmly dressed men contest a singles match of colf, along the bank of a meandering river. Although the clubhead of the player to the right is hidden in the rough, his companion holds the colf for the scoring shot in the game

Zoals vele andere Nederlandse kunstenaars trok Cornelis naar Rome om zijn blik te verruimen en zijn kunstzinnige vaardigheden te verbeteren. Tijdens zijn verblijf aldaar trok hij op met Paul Bril, in 1622 68 jaar, en met Bartholomeus Breenbergh, toen 22 jaar. Aangenomen wordt dat het deze twee medekunstenaars zijn die hier zijn afgebeeld (Bartholomeus Breenberg links en Paul Bril rechts).

Op de achtergrond zien we een schets van het oude Rome.

Onder de spelers is de tekst 'in Zoomer 1622' geschreven.

English

Steven J.H. van Hengel

In the beginning of the 17th century it was quite customary for artists from the Low Countries to go to Rome for some year to learn about the Italian style and technique of painting and drawing. When in Rome they united into the 'Band of Painters', a sort of club with nicknames and all.

Cornelis van Poelenburgh, born at Utrecht in 1586, went to Rome in 1617 and stayed until 1625. When in Rome he became friends with the older Paul Bril (born at Antwerp in 1554) who had come to Rome in 1617 and stayed there until his death in 1526.

Bartholomeus Breenberg was born in Deventer in 1598 and went to Rome in 1620. He was the third of this trio of friends who were often together in the Holy City.

On a sunny day in 1622 Cornelis van Poelenburgh made a small pen-drawing (18.7 x 31.5 cms) . Here then are two men in Dutch garb who, having brought their clubs and balls from home, converted the tuins of ancient Rome into a golf course. Cornelis caught them when the younger had played his ball into the tough and the elder was 'giving him a line'. It is more then probably that the player is Bartholomeus Breenberg and the 'pointer' is Paul Bril. They were a strange group in age, Cornelis was then 36, Bart 22 and Pauk 68!

Bart and Paul must have been keen players to have brought their clubs and balls all that way. For Paul this is substantiated by his painting of 1624, now in the Minneapolis Intitute of Arts, in which he painted a strange concoction of pall-mall and golf (both very popular in his native Antwerp) into an Italian background. Nostalgia?

The scene could have been drawn today. If your partner would ask you to point out the line of play when he is in the rough you would probably do what Paul did in 1622. You golf garb though, may not be quite so eleborate.

Cornelis gave Paul a club with too long a shaft. It must have been a slip of his pen, easily forgiven when you realise that the size of this part of the picture is in actual fact about the size of a postage stamp.

The drawing is now in the Cabinet of Prints and Drawings adjacent to the National Gallery (|Rijksmuseum) in Amsterdam. If you ever get there and want to see it ask for: Tekg.A.form.Nr.A24 - and bring a magnifying glass!

Nederlands

Tekening op papier. Pen in bruin, penseel in bruin, grijs en lichtblauw. 188 x 315 mm

Rijksmuseum (RP-T-1909-44), Amsterdam, Verworven in 1904.

Literatuur

• Golf through the ages by Michael Flannery, pages 130. January 2004

• Dutch drawings of the seventeenth century in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam : artists born between 1580 and 1600, dl. 1: texts, p. 121, dl. 2: plates, p. 146, cat.nr. 264

• Land en water : Hollandse tekeningen uit de 17de eeuw in het Rijksprentenkabinet

Bron: Do Smit, Sara Nijs