Susanna

Rembrandt painted this small panel in Amsterdam in the 1630s, when he was the city's rising portrait star, newly married and much in demand. The subject is Susanna, the virtuous wife from the biblical story who is surprised at her bath by two old men, the elders, who threaten to ruin her name unless she gives in to them. Where other painters filled the scene with the leering old men, Rembrandt pushes them back into the dark and turns the full light on Susanna alone, caught half-undressed and glancing up in alarm. He refused to make her a smooth ideal nude. Look at her lower legs and you can still see the pale rings her stockings have left pressed into the skin, a detail observed from real life.