Betsabea con la lettera di re Davide

In 1654 two painters in Amsterdam took up the same story in the same way. One was Rembrandt. The other, Willem Drost, was his pupil, a young man about to leave for Italy. Both painted Bathsheba, and both skipped the usual scene of King David spying from his roof. They show instead the moment afterward, when she sits holding the letter in which he summons her. The drama moves inward. She has read what the king wants, she knows her husband is away at war, and Drost gives her the same heavy stillness his teacher found that same year. The two pictures hang today in the same museum, the Louvre, close enough to show how much of Rembrandt the young man had taken in before he set out on his own.