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

Southern Europe and would profit off of bad harvest periods and famines in France and England. The Dutch were active in the Atlantic slave trade, and traded slaves in Asia through the 1600s. The mercantile and bourgeois classes bloomed. The country was home to the first transnational corporation, the first modern stock exchange, and the first central bank. John Berger writes “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects… Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth — which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. ” The oil painting depicted only what was entirely external to the spectator, something that could be bought. This medium, through its richness of texture and vibrancy of colour, demonstrated an enriched fidelity to reality. These works demonstrated an enhanced proximity to tangibility which validated their purchase to the spectator-owner alone.

In this period, paintings were more frequently done ‘speculatively’, with no commissioner or patron, to be sold on the market to an unknown buyer. Paintings became more portable, on form fitted canvas, preframed. These were easier to sell to a dispassionate buyer looking for ornamental signs of his wealth to adorn his home and life. Still life, landscape, and genre painting flourished. The former two served as indicators and reflections of luxury items to be owned, vistas to be viewed from held property. Genre painting depicts ‘everyday’ life: people in average clothes, in fields and taverns, smiling and laughing. The poor, ignored in the streets, became comforting in the home — smiling, displaying wares or their labour for sale, smiling at the kindness of their potential benefactors, smiling with their teeth. A house could become filled with refractions of a curated, idealised world, that looked upon an owner with hope and happiness, inviting them to do as they please. During the Dutch Golden Age the hierarchy of genres was a widely held theory, positing still life at the bottom, followed by landscape, genre, portraiture, and finally historical painting. Historical paintings depicted scenes from religion, mythology or antiquity. The classics offered examples of how the heightened moments in life should be lived, or, at least, should be seen to be lived. These paintings decorated the experiences of their owners, adorned their nobility. These were the only kinds of paintings that would depict naked women - Aphrodite, Eve, Leda, the Three Graces, Susanna, Bathsheba…

The human was no longer self-evident. The female subject would appear only when idealised, modeled, under the guise of antiquity. The idea and its representation, the body and mind were unaligned, unlike, for example, portraiture. Calvinism grew in the Netherlands and one’s predestination for salvation needed to be reiterated through worldly prosperity. Although object and nature were increasingly reduced to commodity, there was still an understanding of the perseverance and eternal nature of the soul. The equality of objects in oil painting goes hand in hand with the object’s commodification. Here, more so than the Renaissance, the commodification of the naked woman as an artistic subject is evident. The painting communicates to the spectator-owner through references, not actuality — symbols of femininity, grand antiquity, sophistication and luxury. The subject of the painting could never be more than totally exterior to the spectator-owner. Femininity and the female body are alienated from men and women, stylised, and sold back to a purchaser — a practice that has set tangents for sexual objectification and the porn industry today. The static painting isolates an instant of nudity, while in a lived sexual experience nakedness is an active process. This moment of the painting can very often be chilling in its banality, as sexual fantasy is exposed to be fantasy alone, and the ownership of a instant is shown to be less fulfilling than a tangible experience, or even human relationship. Fundamentally, a painting in this age and ever since is a significant form of property, in a way other ephemeral art forms and literature are not. The human, the naked woman, the spectacle depicted in a painting is commodified by the nature of the oil painting — again when this painting becomes a good to be bought and sold, and again when it is a speculative good, its value fluctuating based on arbitrary qualities and valuations. Orbited by death and despair, Bathsheba holds in her naked stomach this tragic isolation of the subject as she sits, having her feet washed.

Danae, Jacob van Loo (1655-60) Baker Oostwaert and his wife, Jan Steen (1658)