Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Bathsheba at Her Bath with King David’s Letter, 1654, Oil on canvas, 142 cm × 142 cm, The Louvre, Paris
A Dutch poet and critic, writing twelve years after Rembrandt’s death, attacked the painter for depicting the female body without classical idealisation (cited in Schama, 1999). His complaint was specific: Rembrandt chose not a Greek Venus but a washerwoman, with sagging breasts, marks left by corset laces on the skin, garter lines at the knees. Pels meant this as condemnation. It is possible that he had this painting, or works closely related to it, in mind. If so, he saw what was there and entirely missed the point.
The subject comes from the Second Book of Samuel. David, having seen Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop, sends for her; she conceives a child, and the consequences spiral into betrayal, arranged murder, and divine punishment. Earlier treatments of the scene, particularly sixteenth-century engravings by German and Netherlandish printmakers, tended to stage the episode as spectacle: Bathsheba displayed for the viewer’s enjoyment, David watching from a window or balcony, the moral weight falling squarely on his transgression. Rembrandt strips all of that away. David is absent. The architecture is gone. There is no voyeuristic framing. What remains is a woman alone with a piece of paper and a decision she did not ask to make.
The letter is Rembrandt’s invention, or at least his elaboration of a pictorial tradition. The biblical text mentions messengers, not a written summons. By placing a letter in Bathsheba’s hands, Rembrandt converts the scene from one of obedience to one of deliberation. She has received the king’s command, and she is thinking. Her slightly turned posture and lowered gaze suggest absorption rather than display; her body, for all its luminous physicality, belongs to her in this moment. It is precisely the quality Pels objected to, the frankness of a real body rather than an idealised one, that makes the painting’s emotional argument possible. A Venus would invite admiration. This woman asks to be understood.
The attendant kneeling at Bathsheba’s feet, drying or tending to her, occupies a different emotional register entirely. Her task is practical, routine, untroubled. She does not look up. The gap between her absorption in a mundane duty and Bathsheba’s absorption in an impossible choice is where the painting’s force gathers. It is a contrast Rembrandt understood well: the way crisis visits one person in a room while life continues, undisturbed, for everyone else.
Hendrickje Stoffels (c. 1626–1663), Rembrandt’s companion, is widely believed to have sat for the figure of Bathsheba, though the identification rests on comparison with other works rather than documentary evidence. If she did, the painting acquires a further complication. In 1654, Hendrickje was summoned before the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam and admonished for living in sin with the painter. Rembrandt would have been painting a woman he loved in the guise of a woman summoned, against her will, to another man’s bed, at precisely the moment when their own domestic arrangement was under public moral scrutiny. Whether he intended that parallel, or simply could not avoid it, is something the painting does not resolve.
References
Schama, S. (1999) Rembrandt’s Eyes. London: Allen Lane.
Schwartz, G. (2006) Rembrandt’s Universe: His Art, His Life, His World. London: Thames & Hudson.
Tümpel, C. (1993) Rembrandt. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator.
Westermann, M. (2000) Rembrandt. London: Phaidon.