Young woman in bed

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Young woman in bed (Rembrandt van Rijn)
Young woman in bed
Rembrandt van Rijn , 1641 to 1643
Oil on canvas
81.1 x 67.8 cm
Scottish National Gallery , Edinburgh

Young Woman in Bed or Sara Expecting Tobias is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn from 1647, possibly showing Sara in expectation of her husband Tobias , a scene from the apocryphal book Tobit of the Old Testament . The painting is executed in portrait format on canvas and seems to be related to Rembrandt's painting Danaë in the St. Petersburg Hermitage .

Until 1932, the painting was attached to a wooden base made of oak , the composition and shape of which suggest it was used as a door for a piece of furniture. It was probably one of the alcoves common in the 16th century .

description

presentation

The painting shows the life-size half-length figure of a young woman in bed, who has straightened up a little and with her left arm pushes a red, gold-colored patterned curtain aside. Her hair is pinned up at the back and covered with a silver net hood from which a clasp adorned with stones hangs. She wears a gold earring on her right ear. She is dressed in a white shirt that covers the left breast and shoulder and leaves the right shoulder free.

The red curtain hangs down diagonally from the middle of the upper edge and occupies the right edge of the picture at its full height. The bedding is white and patterned with ornaments on the sides. The background is kept in warm brown tones, and tapestries seem to have been attached over the head of the bed. The light falls from the top left so that the woman's right shoulder is illuminated and most of the face and the left side of the body are in the shadow.

signature

Detail: signature

In the lower left corner is the incomplete signature Rembra , underneath f 164 , with an illegible year number. This area of ​​the painting is severely affected by the abrasion of paint and primer. Nevertheless, it was evidently Rembrandt's intention to make his signature as a trompe-l'oeil part of the depiction. His name is painted in dark brown on the bed sheet in such a way that the last letters seem to disappear in a fold of the duvet cover. The signature and the year cannot be qualified as genuine or false by a scientific examination because of their severe damage. Nevertheless, they are generally recognized as authentic.

Technical inspection

The painting has the format 81.2 cm × 67.9 cm and is painted with oil paint on canvas. The canvas consists of two pieces of different rolls of canvas. A strip about eight to ten centimeters wide is sewn on the right edge, which is about two centimeters wider at the bottom than at the top. The seam roughly follows the right fold of the curtain shown. The structure of the fabric indicates that the canvas pieces were stretched and primed before they were used for this painting. There are rows of holes on either side, which are more like nail holes than the thread holes previously made for stretching canvases. The striking size of at least some of the holes could be due to rusting nails that used to secure the canvas to a wooden base.

Until 1932 the canvas was glued to a wooden base. X-rays of the painting allow conclusions to be drawn about the construction of this wooden panel. It was a board made up of several boards of different widths. The boards were 20 ½, 12, 10, 9 and 18 centimeters wide from left to right, with gaps of different widths between them. There is the possibility that two or more boards originally belonged together, tore over time, and were finally separated from each other. The upper rounding was formed by a correspondingly shaped transverse board and extended over the outer corners of the side boards. Such a construction is very unusual for a panel painting. One plausible explanation is that the backing was the door of a piece of furniture that had cracks and crevices from the outset. The canvas had to be nailed or glued on in order to create a continuous, even surface for painting.

Art historical classification

Danaë , 1636 and circa 1643, Hermitage , Saint Petersburg

Dating

Dating the young woman in bed continues to present problems to this day. Until the restoration in 1929, the decade of the signature was read as 5 and corrected to 4 after cleaning the image . Dating to 1657 led to the identification of the model with Hendrickje Stoffels , which is no longer maintained today.

The Young Woman in Bed seems to be connected to Rembrandt's Danae in the St. Petersburg Hermitage in a way that cannot be determined with certainty . Rembrandt had already completed this painting in 1636, but painted over the figure of Danaë in 1643 or shortly before that . The stylistic features of the Danaë and the Young Woman in Bed suggest that the Danaë was the last to be revised . This means that the young woman in bed can be dated from 1641 to 1643 at the latest.

Early interpretations

Until well into the 20th century, Rembrandt research endeavored to relate the portraits and figures of Rembrandt to his biography. The Young Woman in Bed was also identified with one of Rembrandt's wives for generations. Cornelis Hofstede de Groot stated that she had the facial features of Hendrickje Stoffels . Since the last digit of the date is illegible, Saskia van Uylenburgh and Geertje Dircx were also considered as the person portrayed. It later became clear that the woman depicted cannot be identified without a reliable dating. In addition, the question was raised whether it is actually a portrait of a real person. It is inconceivable that Rembrandt painted one of the women in his household as a nude so that customers could have identified her in the painting. Therefore the picture is only called a young woman in bed today.

The book of Tobit

Wedding night of Tobias and Sara , Pieter Lastman , 1611, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Wedding Night of Tobias and Sara , Rembrandt, 1640s, pencil and brown ink on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York

The book of Tobit is one of the apocryphal writings of the Old Testament . In it, Tobit tells the story of his life. One of the main characters is Sara , whose seven husbands so far were killed by the demon Asmodaeus on their wedding night . Sarah desperately asks God for mercy in prayer ( Tob 3: 10–17  EU ). Tobias , the son of the blind Tobit, is accompanied on a journey by the archangel Raphael , who brings about the encounter with Sara and reveals Tobias a smoking spell against the demons and a cure for the blind father. Before the wedding night with Sara, Tobias offers a smoke offering from the liver and heart of a fish, as Raphael had told him. As a result, Asmodäus is repulsed and can be tied up by Raphael ( Tob 5–8  EU ).

The book of Tobit was extremely popular with Catholics and Protestants in the Netherlands in the 17th century because of its moralizing content and the subject of numerous paintings and prints. Rembrandt also repeatedly depicted scenes from the book in paintings, etchings and drawings.

In 1967, the German art historian Christian Tümpel suggested an interpretation of the painting as a scene from the book Tobit. His assessment is based on a painting by Pieter Lastman, one of Rembrandt's teachers, from 1611. It shows a woman in the same pose as Rembrandt's painting, together with Tobit at the smoke offering and the archangel Raphael fighting the demon. Sara's attitude is remarkable because Lastman turns away from the usual representation with his painting. Most of the time Sara was depicted in prayer. The fact that Lastman focuses on Tobias' smoke offering and Raphael's fight with the demon is a return to the text of the Bible.

Whether Rembrandt's painting is the same scene is not clear from the representation. However, the explanation seems plausible, especially since Rembrandt repeatedly depicted individual figures or small groups of figures removed from complex historical contexts. This form of representation, also referred to by Tümpel as “separation”, was intended to intensify the content of a scene compared to traditional representations or to emphasize the relationship between two people. Further examples of such detachments in Rembrandt are The Leper King Uzziah , painted around 1639, and Moses with the Tablets of the Law from 1659. In general, such detachments are the form of devotional images of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, on which saints outside the context of the biblical story as portraits or Half-length images are shown.

The motif of Tobias and Sara's wedding night was also taken up by Rembrandt in a drawing dated to the 1640s, which is now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art . There he followed the traditional iconography with Sara praying. Rembrandt's painting, on the other hand, shows the moment when Tobias is busy with the smoke offering to ward off the demon and Sara awaits him in her bed. Consequently, the title of the painting is Sara expecting Tobias or Sara expecting Tobias . Since Tümpel's interpretation is largely based on a single Lastman painting, it was only hesitantly received by experts.

Trompe-l'œils in the work of Rembrandt and his surroundings

The Holy Family with the Curtain , Rembrandt, 1646, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister , Kassel

Trompe-l'œils were a popular pictorial motif in Dutch painting of the Golden Age . In the case of the Young Woman in Bed , Rembrandt's signature becomes part of the pictorial illusion in that the painter apparently lets the end of his signature disappear into a fold in the bedding. Similarly, Rembrandts hid the end of his signature in the fold of a bed sheet in his Jacobean Blessing of 1656. It is not unusual for him that Rembrandt makes the signature part of the picture. About 40 paintings are known in which he did this, and he often distorted his signature in perspective to adapt it to a surface such as a curved piece of paper.

Trompe-l'œils were popular pictorial motifs, especially in the form of painted windows that someone looks out of or climbs out of. In this respect, the portrayal of the young woman in bed is not really innovative. A few years later, Rembrandt's Holy Family with the Curtain made clear progress , in which a frame with a curtain became the motif for the first time. Such a motif had previously never existed in Rembrandt's work or in other Dutch painters.

alcove

Alcoves were common furnishings in the Netherlands until well into the 20th century . They were characterized by a great variety, from simple wooden cabinets, the opening of which could only be covered with a curtain, to large constructions with several doors and rich carvings. Painted doors have also been used since the 16th century. In April 1989 a wooden plaque was discovered in a house on Amsterdam's Warmoesstraat where Joost van den Vondel had been selling silk stockings, which had been painted in the late 16th or early 17th century with a genre scene from a silk mill. An etching after Jan van der Straet from 1585 could be identified as the presumed model for this painting .

Ernst van de Wetering not only considers Tümpel's interpretation as a Tobit motif, but also the use of the painting as the door of an alcove to be plausible. The portrait of François Tronchin , painted in 1757, shows the young woman in bed as a thin picture without a frame, and in a directory of his collection Tronchin describes the picture as marouflaged .

  • Dutch alcove

  • Ornate oak alcove, first half 17th century, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

  • Room in the Rococo style , two alcoves with doors, Gaastmeer

  • Painted exterior of a historic alcove, Hindeloopen

  • Painted alcove doors, re-use in a café in Roosendaal , 1999

Restorations

In March 1929, immediately after the Exhibition of Dutch Art 1450-1900 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the painting was cleaned and the varnish replaced in the London branch of M Knoedler & Co by the Dutch restorer A. Martin de Wild . De Wild used a new varnish for the painting, the color of which matched that of the lightest areas of the picture before cleaning, so as not to change the visual impression of the painting too radically. During the cleaning process, de Wild came to the conclusion that Rembrandt's signature was genuine. He was also able to identify the third digit of the year as 4 instead of 5 . Contrary to widespread information in the literature, the wooden base was not removed during this restoration. The joints and cracks in the base were filled with paraffin and the paint layer that had been peeled off in the area of ​​the joints was again attached to the base.

In 1932, the Young Woman in Bed was shown in Amsterdam during an art exhibition to mark the 300th anniversary of the Universiteit van Amsterdam . On this occasion, Martin de Wild examined the painting again. The paraffin fillings of the cracks and joints had been pushed out by working the wood at fluctuating temperature and humidity and had lifted the layer of paint again. There was a fear that the wooden panel could disintegrate into its individual parts. The only permanent protection against this was seen to be the removal of the wooden panel and the doubling of the canvas. The management of the National Gallery of Scotland consulted with Dutch experts such as Frederik Schmidt Degener and David Röell from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Dirk Hannema from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. It was decided to have the work carried out in The Hague immediately after the exhibition. Martin de Wild removed the wooden base and relined the canvas with two layers of new canvas soaked in wax and resin. After doubling, the varnish applied in 1929 was removed and replaced with a lighter one. Some old restorations had to be repeated.

In 1966 the varnish, which had yellowed again, was replaced. In the process, old overpaintings were removed and damaged areas repaired.

Associated Works

Portrait of François Tronchin with his Rembrandt painting “Young Woman in Bed” , Jean-Étienne Liotard , 1757, Cleveland Museum of Art

painting

The most important work related to the Young Woman in Bed is the portrait of François Tronchin with his Rembrandt painting “Young Woman in Bed” by the French Jean-Étienne Liotard . The Geneva lawyer, politician and art collector François Tronchin had himself depicted with his Rembrandt. The pastel painting on vellum is considered to be one of Liotard's best works.

Copy, oil on canvas, 81.0 × 64.5 cm , offered at Sotheby’s 2004

A copy of Rembrandt's painting was offered on July 6, 2004 by the British auction house Sotheby’s in London at an estimate of £ 3,000 to £ 5,000 but was not sold. The reverse was noted in a later hand: 31./Ferdinand Boll. (Overtort-Bagside 1954 P. Flemming) . This copy was mentioned and illustrated by Horst Gerson in 1969 in his revision of the catalog raisonné by Abraham Bredius.

Drawings and prints

Two pencil drawings by Richard Cooper have survived, which apparently served as drafts for a reversed mezzotint from 1781. The illustrator Paul Jonnard made a woodcut that appeared in 1893 as an illustration of an article about Hendrickje Stoffels in the Magazine of Art .

  • Drawings and prints

  • Richard Cooper II, drawing, apparently a draft, c. 1780, pencil on paper, 22.4 cm × 16.9 cm , National Galleries of Scotland

  • Richard Cooper II, drawing, c. 1780, pencil on paper, 29.3 cm × 22.3 cm , National Galleries of Scotland

  • Richard Cooper II, mezzotint, 1781, proof, 23.7 cm × 22.9 cm

  • Richard Cooper II, mezzotint, 1781

  • Paul Jonnard, woodcut from the Magazine of Art , 1893

reception

As a work by Rembrandt that has been known for centuries, The Young Woman in Bed is listed in all catalog raisonnés, the authenticity of the painting has never been questioned. Cornelis Hofstede de Groot included the painting with the number 305 in his catalog raisonné. The painting with the number 110 is listed in Abraham Bredius' catalog raisonné from 1935. Kurt Bauch assigned the number 266 in 1966. Horst Gerson took the number 110 in his adaptation of the new edition of Bredius' directory and included the picture in his own catalog with the number 227. Christian Tümpel lists the young woman in bed as number 23 in his catalog published in 1986.

The Rembrandt Research Project did not initially get to the discussion of the painting, in the fifth volume from 2011 it is only mentioned in passing with Rembrandt's Danaë . It was not until the last volume, published in 2015, that Ernst van de Wetering described the young woman in bed on less than two pages, the painting was given the number 194.

Provenance

The earliest documented owner of the painting is Viktor Amadeus I of Savoy-Carignan (1690–1741), the Prince of Carignan . When his collection was auctioned on July 30, 1742 and July 18, 1743 in Paris, the painting was not listed in the auction catalog. The English art dealer William Buchanan (1777–1864) stated that Viktor Amadeus I gave the painting to the doctor Théodore Tronchin as a thank you for the successful inoculation of the Sardinian royal family . He does not provide any information about the exact time of this donation. Nothing is known about the circumstances under which the painting came into the possession of Théodore's cousin François Tronchin.

The Tronchin family was one of the most important Geneva families of the 18th century. François Tronchin (1704–1798) was first a banker, then a writer, and in 1738 was elected to the Small Council of the City of Geneva. In 1740 Tronchin began to build up his (first) collection of paintings, which he sold to Catherine II in 1770 through the mediation of Denis Diderot . Tronchin was in close contact with Voltaire . In 1755 he helped him to obtain permission to stay in the city republic of Geneva, and from 1765 he lived in his former house, Les Délices , which now houses the Musée Voltaire. Tronchin was an important patron , through him the Geneva painter Jean-Étienne Liotard was commissioned with several portraits of members of the Tronchin family. In 1757 François Tronchin had Liotard portray himself with the young woman in bed .

Around 1765 the painting passed into the possession of the Venetian Conte Vitturi, according to Buchanan in exchange for paintings by Italian masters. The painting is not listed in the Tronchins Collection's printed catalog from 1765, but the catalog manuscript identifies it as no.25.

Around 1776 the London art dealer Thomas Moore Slade (1749-1831) acquired the painting, who sold it to Charles Maynard, 2nd Viscount Maynard (1751-1824) around 1790. In an unexplained way, the painting came before 1836 to Lady Mildmay in London and by inheritance to Henry St John-Mildmay, 5th Baronet (1810-1902), who exhibited it in 1883 in London in the winter exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts . The painting was later in the collection of the London art dealer Samson Wertheimer (1811–1892). On March 19, 1892, it was auctioned by Samson's son Charles J. Wertheimer (1842–1911) at Christie's in London. It was sold there for 5,000 guineas to a Mr. Haynes and a few days later for 5,775 pounds sterling to the Scottish brewer , politician and patron William McEwan (1827-1913). He donated it to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh in the same year .

Exhibitions (chronological)

  • Royal Academy of Arts , London, England, 1883. Old Masters Winter Exhibition, catalog no. 235.
  • Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House , London, England, 1929. Exhibition Exhibition of Dutch Art 1450–1900 (German: Exhibition of Dutch Art 1450–1900 ), catalog no . 115.
  • Rijksmuseum Amsterdam , Netherlands, 1932. Exhibition Rembrandt tentoonstelling ter plechtige herdenking van het 300-jarig bestaan ​​of the Universiteit van Amsterdam (German: Rembrandt exhibition to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Universiteit van Amsterdam ), catalog no. 24.
  • Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1969. Exhibition Rembrandt 1669/1969 , catalog no . 7th
  • Musée Rath , Geneva, 1974. Exhibition De Genève à l'Ermitage. Les collections de François Tronchin (German: From Geneva to the Hermitage. The collections of François Tronchin ), catalog no. 200.
  • Altes Museum , Berlin, 1991. Rembrandt exhibition . The master and his workshop , catalog no. 36.
  • National Gallery of Scotland , Edinburgh, Scotland, 1992. Exhibition Dutch art and Scotland. A reflection of taste (German: Dutch art and Scotland. A reflection on taste ), catalog no . 50.
  • National Gallery of Victoria , Melbourne, Australia, 1997. Rembrandt exhibition . A genius and his impact (German: Rembrandt. A genius and his impact ), catalog no. 14th
  • National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2001; Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, England, 2001. Exhibition Rembrandt's women (German: Rembrandts Frauen ), catalog no. 100.
  • Gemäldegalerie , Berlin, 2006. Exhibition Rembrandt - Genius in Search , catalog no. 43.
  • Scottish National Gallery , Edinburgh, Scotland, 2018. Exhibition Rembrandt. Britain's discovery of the master (German: Rembrandt. The British discovery of the master ), catalog no. 9.

literature

Web links

Commons : Young Woman in Bed  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. VI , Werk 194 Rembrandt, Sarah waiting for Tobias , pp. 584-586.
  2. ↑ a b British picture restorers, 1600–1950. National Portrait Gallery website , entry Derix de Wild (1869–1932) and Martin de Wild (1899–1969). Picture restorers , August 2019, accessed November 9, 2019.
  3. ↑ a b c d Cornelis Hofstede de Groot: Descriptive and critical directory, sixth volume, work 305, p. 13.
  4. ^ Stanley Cursiter: New Light on Rembrandt's So-Called 'Hendrikje' at Edinburgh .
  5. ↑ Numa S. Trivas: New Light on Rembrandt's So-Called “Hendrikje” at Edinburgh .
  6. ↑ a b Musée d'art et d'histoire (ed.): De Genève à l'Ermitage , Werk 200 Femme dans un lit , pp. 101-102.
  7. ↑ Eric Jan Sluijter: Rembrandt and the female nude , pp. 311-332.
  8. ↑ JBF van Gils: Toch Daniël, rivet Rafaël, bij Jan Steen .
  9. ^ A b Christian Tümpel: Studies on the Iconography of the Histories of Rembrandt , pp. 176–179.
  10. ↑ Dagmar Hirschfelder: Tronie and Portrait in the Dutch painting of the 17th century , pp. 188-189.
  11. ^ Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. VI , Werk 245 Rembrandt, Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph , pp. 633–634.
  12. ^ Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. VI , Werk 259 Rembrandt, Portrait of an unknown scholar (also known as 'The Auctioneer') , pp. 641–645.
  13. ↑ a b Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (Ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. V , Werk V 6 Rembrandt or pupil - The Holy Family with painted frame and curtain , pp. 389–404.
  14. ↑ Michel M. Bakker: A signposted panel was found in het pand Warmoesstraat 90 .
  15. ^ Correspondence between Martin de Wild and the National Gallery of Scotland, February / March 1929 and a report by Stanley Cursiter from 1929. RKDtechnical website of the RKD - Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, accessed on November 10, 2019.
  16. ↑ Correspondence between Martin de Wild and the National Gallery of Scotland, September 1932 and a report by Stanley Cursiter from 1932. RKDtechnical website of the RKD - Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, accessed on November 10, 2019.
  17. ↑ restoration report by Harry Russell Halkerston Woolford from 1966. Website RKDtechnical the RKD - Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, accessed on 10 November of 2019.
  18. ↑ a b Musée d'art et d'histoire (ed.): De Genève à l'Ermitage , Werk 5 François Tronchin 1796 , p. 186.
  19. ↑ a b Abraham Bredius: Rembrandt. Third edition. Revised by Horst Gerson , work 110.
  20. ↑ Lot 526. After Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn. An interior with a lady, possibly Hendrikje Stoffels, lying in bed and holding her breast. Sotheby’s website , accessed November 10, 2019.
  21. ↑ Abraham Bredius: Rembrandt. Painting , work 110.
  22. ↑ Kurt Bauch: Rembrandt. Painting , work 266.
  23. ^ Horst Gerson: Rembrandt paintings , work 227.
  24. ^ Christian Tümpel: Rembrandt. Myth and Method , Work 23.
  25. ^ A b William Buchanan: Memoirs of painting , Volume 1, p. 331.
  26. ↑ a b Rembrandt. A Woman in bed, gedateerd 164 [7] on the website of the RKD - Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis , accessed on November 10, 2019.
  27. ↑ John Smith: A catalog raisonné , pp. 65–66.
  28. ^ National Gallery of Scotland (Ed.): Catalog of the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Forty-fourth edition .