Hendrickje Stoffels Bathing

Catalogue number: Bredius 437.

There are overtones in this picture of the biblical subject of either Bathsheba or Susanna and the Elders; this much is made clear by the heavy gold and red cloak behind the figure and by the grotto-like setting. At least in these areas, Rembrandt was seeking to create a romantic effect. Still, as is so often the case in his work, the dividing line between a religious subject and a product of the artist's fancy, with no particular subject intended, is a fine one. The young woman appears completely absorbed in her bathe and shows no sign of the reactions appropriate to either Susanna or Bathsheba. As a work of art, the picture has all the characteristics of an independent study, or a sketch made for its own sake, and the figure, if not the background, was evidently painted from life. The brushstrokes are dashing and impulsive, suggesting rather than defining the forms; except in the head and flesh-parts of the figure, no attention at all is paid to detail. The abiding impression is one of spontaneity and freedom.

The small Woman bathing in a Stream is so tenderly intimate, so informal in pose and spontaneous in technique that it appears at first sight like the record of an actual experience: Rembrandt's mistress Hendrickje Stoffels wading in a stream. But the gold and crimson robe lying on the bank suggests that the bathing woman should be read as a biblical or mythological figure, Susanna, Bathsheba or Diana. The year of the painting, 1654, was also the year when Hendrickje, whom we recognise from other pictures, suffered public humiliation because of her liaison with the artist and bore him their only child. Re-casting a personal and sensuous image of a loved sitter in traditional guise was a seventeenth-century convention, and the ambiguous narrative could add resonance to the real-life relationship. The apocryphal heroine Susanna innocently aroused sexual desire in the old men who falsely accused her; Bathsheba's beauty (2 Samuel 10) tempted King David into mortal sin; seeing Diana bathing in the woods cost the hunter Actaeon his life.