Night swimmer …
It’s night and a typically shadowy Rembrandt van Rijn setting. This figure seems to have emerged as much from the interior darkness of the mind, a glowing nocturnal fantasy, as from the overhanging trees.
Natural woman …
Yet the sexual charge of this 1654 painting comes from its earthy immediacy, its “realness”. The artist’s loose, expressionistic brushstrokes conjure a frank eroticism: from the overtly suggestive “V” of the woman’s shift to her naturalistic, slightly awkward wading pose and her knobbly knees.
Who’s that girl? …
The scene has mystery too. What have we stumbled upon? Is it Diana’s pregnant nymph, Callisto, banished to the wilderness in a Dutch version of the myth? Is the model the artist’s young common-law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels, who, like Callisto, had recently been pregnant (with his child) and suffered her own banishment, from her church? Is this the biblical Susannah, spied on by the Elders, stand-ins for the church council, or Stoffels’s own older love, the artist himself?
Included in Rembrandt’s Light, Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21, to 2 February
