Bethsabée à sa toilette

Rembrandt made this in 1643, the year after his wife Saskia died and the year after he finished the huge civic portrait now called the Night Watch. He takes a story from the Hebrew Bible, King David spying from a distant tower on Bathsheba as she bathes, and he lets it be frankly physical. Two attendants tend to her, one combing out her hair, one drying her feet, while she sits lost in her own thoughts. Some of his contemporaries disliked exactly this, complaining that his women from scripture had the marks of real garters pressed into their real legs. You can find that pressed line on her left calf. Much of the surface is worn thin now from old cleanings.