REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN
Dutch, 1606-1669
Woman Sitting Half-Dressed
beside a Stove, 1658
Etching. 9 x 7 1/4 (22.9 x 18.4 cm)
Museum Associates Purchase. 65.68
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This etching from 1658 is perhaps Rembrandt's finest print of a nude, and
certainly embodies an unusual and touching aspect of his treatment of this
subject, a kind of shy eroticism, a chaste nakedness, overt and tentative
at the same time. His other etchings in the 1650s of women in various stages
of undress show them sleeping, turned away from us, or in profile, very
different from the explicit and dramatic versions of this subject from more
than a quarter century earlier, in the early 1630s. This radiant image is
an intimate and domestic successor, as it were, to the monumental painting
of Bathsheba from 1654, in the Louvre; both figures are in profile, looking
down without expression, thereby gaining greatly in gravity and spiritual
depth.
This impression is from the final state of the print; there are two primary
differences from the earlier states: the removal of the woman's cap, and
the addition of a key on the chimney of the stove. The first change allows
the niche (or closed window) behind the woman's head to reverberate around
her; the second adds a tactile, down-to-earth detail to the scene that makes
it more domestic and immediate. This is a beautiful, lifetime impression
of one of Rembrandt's most sensitive prints, with a remarkably subtle play
of light and shadow throughout the room.
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