Bathsheba at Her Bath Holding King David's Letter
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669) · 1654
King David has seen Bathsheba bathing from his roof and has sent for her. Rembrandt paints the moment after the letter has been read: the summons hangs from her fingers, her eyes have gone somewhere else entirely, and an old servant, head bowed, dries her feet without looking up. Everything that the story contains, adultery, the death of her husband Uriah arranged by the king, the child who will die and the son Solomon who will not, is already present in that lowered gaze. Almost no other treatment of the subject gives Bathsheba an inner life at all; most use the biblical pretext for a nude at her toilet.
The body is the point of the picture and also its argument. This is a real body, heavy, softly lit, with creases at the stomach and a reddened knee, painted in thick, dragged, warm impasto over a dark ground so that the flesh seems to hold the light it has absorbed. The white linen beneath her is worked with a loaded brush into ridges you can read from across the room. X-radiographs show Rembrandt raised and then lowered her head, turning an upward, almost startled look into resignation, and the canvas has been cut down, which tightens the square format around her.
The model is traditionally identified as Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt's companion, who was about twenty-eight in 1654 and was that year summoned before the Amsterdam church council over their relationship, though some scholars regard the figure as an ideal type he used for years. The painting reached the Louvre in 1869 with the vast bequest of Doctor Louis La Caze.
Did You Know? The same year Rembrandt painted this study of a woman summoned by a king, his partner Hendrickje was summoned by the Amsterdam church council and censured for living with him.
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