Growing Strong
the female body and the dutch golden age by Alex Mcleay
Each body appears to the outside in a completely different fashion to the way it is experienced by the one who inhabits it. Any One and Other are similar in more ways than they differ, yet the corporeal body bounds the extent of physical experience. Each body, for the one experiencing its pathways of habit and effort, is defined by internal landmarks of pleasure and pain, courses of joys through arteries and the return of agonies through veins. The landscape of another’s body is almost impossible to know through sight alone - the tiredness of one’s muscles, the sensitivity of the soles of their feet, frustration tensed tightly in limbs and extremities. Gaining knowledge of another and understanding the similarities between bodies can usually only be found through time and touch, as when a parent knows to avoid scrubbing too hard behind their child’s ear during a bath. However, I am almost certain that Bathsheba and I hold our devotion in our stomachs.
Eventually, Bathsheba will put down the letter she has received from her husband and go to King David. Her husband will shortly be killed, and she will become pregnant with the child of King David who will shortly afterward die. But, during the moment captured by Bathsheba Reading David’s Letter (Rembrandt, 1654), this is yet to come. At the centre of this instant is the stomach of Bathsheba. After the first time I saw this painting, I could not take my mind off it — how the fat of her sides dimpled, the soft curve that moved down to her thighs, the pear and blue pucker of her navel. At the centre of her body, this tender space houses her future grief, and at the centre of this story, it houses the death of her husband and her son. Bathsheba sits with an awkward posture — her back leg raised above her front, her head and navel facing off two different tangents. The unusual curve of her spine may be justified by the delivering of her bare body to the spectator. However, it is not delivered coherently. The draping and weight of the limbs speaks more to the experience carried within herself — sign posts and avenues of affections, energies, capabilities for what
is to come when the letter is put down. What does a woman’s body mean, what does it mean in a painting? The answer is never the same, no matter how many times the question is asked. Here it is the home of tragedy to come, the space she will always come back to, softness to comfort the strength of her endurance. In Bathsheba with King David’s Letter (1654), painted by an apprentice of Rembrandt, Willem Drost, her large, soft eyes are pushed aside by the central framing of her breast, tumbling out of draped linen. Her skin is cool and smokey, her bust fills canvas, and her languorous posture is closer to a sculpted Venus than a woman at her bath. She does not, as in her former iteration, appear engaged in her own actions. Alone, isolated as an erotic figure, she is a subject aware of being a woman, and aware of being surveyed. The female nude is a recurring subject matter in the tradition of European oil painting — a hairless, pale woman, presented for the spectator as a sexual object, with little to nothing to do with her own sexuality. There is a stated humanism in the tradition of European art: the individual autonomy of the male painter, patron, owner. This has been complimented and contradicted by the objectification of the female subject. The splayed flesh and form of the woman is made available to the spectator-owner in such a way that allows him to view her to minuscule detail. He does so at a moment’s notice, in the company of his peers, in a way that cannot imagine her doing the same to him.
Bathsheba (Rembrandt, 1654) was painted during the Dutch Golden Age, a period of capitalist prosperity as the Dutch East India Company expanded through South East Asia and the Baltic States. The Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company gained a monopoly on the spice trade into Europe as their naval capacity grew. The Netherlands also imported harvest goods in bulk from Eastern and
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