Seated Female Nude
Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)
1660/62
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, with subtractive highlights (scraping) and touches of opaque white watercolor corrections, on ivory laid paper, laid down on cream laid card
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- Primary/secondary supports: 21.2 × 17.5 cm (8 3/8 × 6 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- Holland
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
For Rembrandt van Rijn, simple honesty of vision and sureness of line were far more important than the classical glorification of the nude. He focused on this subject only during certain phases of his career, and very few of the resulting studies, which he used to prepare biblical or mythological representations, survive today. This strong form is a late work, and one of only four extant drawings of the female nude attributed to Rembrandt with certainty. Unlike the almost scientific realism of his earlier nudes, his late studies are less detailed and more painterly. He attained a maximum of expression with a minimum of means. Rendered with a swift treatment by brush and the blunt reed pen favored by the artist in his late years, this ample figure projects a forceful presence. Her face is generalized, and her feelings are suggested through her contemplative pose. Her simple shape and external immobility seem to increase the viewer’s sense of her inner vitality. In Seated Female Nude, Rembrandt’s penstrokes and brushwork are integrated with the utmost lightness and perfection; the pen stresses structural features, while the brush provides a transparent, atmospheric tone linking…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
