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Jacques de Gheyn the Younger was a draughtsman, engraver and painter. Although, like his teacher Hendrick Goltzius, his early works exhibit a fantasy-like, mannerist style, from around 1600 he began to draw naturalistic nudes, including Four Studies of a Woman. There is no longer any question of erotic tension or of artificial, standard poses, as when Goltzius drew live models. De Gheyn observes a woman during her daily round, combing her long hair and then plaiting it, activities that he captures in black chalk on the left- and right- hand sides of the page. The two sketches in the middle were probably done from memory without the model in front of him. The frank realism with which the female body is depicted here was something totally new in Dutch art. These nudes show De Gheyn's great knowledge of human anatomy, revealed through his superior drawing technique. Using slightly curved hatchings he succeeds so precisely and naturally in indicating the passage from harder to softer parts of the body, that even the internal structure of the skeleton becomes tangible.
This sheet belongs to a group of drawings from 1602-03, showing women asleep or at their toilet. These very intimate studies of human beings in natural poses were perhaps produced under the influence of contemporary Venetian nudes and continue a tradition of anatomical studies going back to Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer. De Gheyn's personal and extensive corpus of works suggests that for him drawing had become a more independent activity, with the result that we have a relatively large number of exercise sheets from his hand, like the present example. Even so, at times he transposed figures from such studies into other compositions that were not drawn from life and which concealed a symbolic significance. Many artists later in the 17th century were to use figure studies drawn from life in various paintings produced from imagination, and De Gheyn can be seen as a pioneer of this practice. Added to this he was one of the first northern artists to depict scenes from family life with a directness and warmth that were to be so typical of Rembrandt's drawings.
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