![]() ![]() Bol used black chalk to render the woman’s contours and created volume by employing white heightening on the left side of her body in contrast with the dark shadows that sculpt her spine and lower back. This contrast becomes particularly clear when comparing Rembrandt’s Nude Woman Lying on a Pillow with Bol’s Reclining Female Nude Seen from Behind. Through subtle modeling, he depicted more elegant and idealized female nudes. Bol, however, sought to perfect the female form. Unlike his contemporaries, Rembrandt rendered women as natural as possible, showing puckered or dimpled flesh and sagging breasts and bellies. Imperfection versus IdealizationĪpart from having these women pose fully nude, Bol and Flinck also took this opportunity to turn away from Rembrandt’s style. Rembrandt seems to have been inspired by these clandestine drawing sessions organized by some of his most successful former pupils, because from the late 1650s onwards, he also hired women to pose fully naked. Unlike Rembrandt, however, they had the sitters pose fully unclothed. The oldest dates from 1648 and states that the artist Govert Flinck painted three sisters “as stark naked as one could possibly be, lying asleep on a pillow in a most indecent manner.” A second, well-known document from July 27, 1658, mentions a group of painters, including Bol and Flinck, who officially declared that Catarina Jans-who was being prosecuted for sex work-posed for them stark naked.īoth Bol and Flinck had trained with Rembrandt, and his studio practice likely inspired them to hire female models. Several court documents prosecuting women have survived and provide further details about how artists had sex workers sit for them. Even though sex work was illegal during Rembrandt and Bol’s time, the profession was flourishing-perhaps because it offered women the potential to earn three times the amount of money they could make from legal work. As an advanced pupil in Rembrandt’s studio from 1630 to around 1640, Bol would have participated in these life drawing sessions.ĭuring the late 1640s and 1650s, after Bol had left Rembrandt’s studio, a group of artists in Amsterdam started to organize regular informal drawing sessions for which they hired sex workers to pose nude. During the late 1630s and 1640s, Rembrandt occasionally hired women to pose seminude, usually exposing only their chests and stomachs. He made his more advanced students pose for each other while wearing only a loincloth. (Interestingly, almost all of these artists favored black and white chalk on blue paper or red chalk on white paper.) From Rembrandt’s Studio to Informal Drawing Sessionsĭrawing “after life” was an integral part of Rembrandt’s teaching practice, and his pupils were expected to emulate both their master’s style and technique. They all seem to have originated from live drawing sessions during which artists sketched the same naked model from different angles. This work was part of a group of 20 drawings that were bound together in one album dating from the late 17th century. Ferdinand Bol’s Reclining Female Nude Seen from Behind, currently on view at the Getty Center, is a prime example of this new artistic practice.
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