Nymphs bathing

Nymphs Bathing, located in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, belongs to a significant tradition of mythological figure painting in Flemish art in which landscape painters like Jan Brueghel the Elder provided the setting while figure specialists contributed the human forms. The nymph bathing subject — women at a forest pool, observed without their knowledge — gave artists licence to combine lush landscape with female nudity in a format that was simultaneously decorative and morally framed by mythological convention. Buenos Aires' national collection, assembled over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with strong European buying campaigns, includes this work as evidence of the global dispersal of Flemish Baroque painting through centuries of sale and export. The given date of 1650 likely refers to a workshop version or later copy, as Jan Brueghel the Elder died in 1625 during an outbreak of cholera in Antwerp. Workshop continuations and copies were common for popular subjects throughout the seventeenth century, and the quality of the landscape setting suggests either the elder Brueghel's hand or that of his son Jan Brueghel the Younger, who maintained the family workshop.

The panel support and the handling of foliage and water are consistent with the Brueghel workshop tradition. The forest pool is painted with the characteristic translucency of still, dark water reflecting the overhanging trees above — a technique demanding careful management of overlapping glazes. The figures, handled somewhat differently from the landscape, are likely by a distinct hand.