The Infinite Moment

Rembrandt’s

A Woman Bathing in a Stream

Toyin Adepoju

Symbols from Hindu goddess devotion embodying the fifteen nityas , fifteen manifestations of the goddess Lalita
Tripurasundari, the Transcendent Beauty of the Three Cities of Waking, Sleep and Ultimate Knowledge. The symbol
in the centre of this page is described as manifesting Bhagamalini , one of Lalita’s fifteen expressions. Lalita’smany
faceted beauty, expressed through her manifestations, makes her emblematic of the various possibilities of beauty
and of how it may be understood, her beauty embodying the beauty perceived, the act of perception and the
person perceving this beauty. Her beauty is therefore representative of the reflective relationship to beauty
represented by aesthetics.
In the painting A Woman Bathing in a Stream, by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, we see an
intimate scene of a woman entering a stream, her skirt raised to her knees. The realistic and
unflattering depiction of the knees, the humble setting of the stream, the woman’s clothes and the
background, evoke something homely, expressive of the daily round of Rembrandt's life with his
wife Hendrickje, the woman in the painting, and suggestive of the quiet pleasures of human life,
generally, such as the satisfaction of taking a bath.

This is Rembrandt in his quasi-erotic mode, combining the erotic and the homely, the suggestive
and the down to earth. The painting evokes an erotic tenderness on account of the action of the
woman as she prepares to unrobe. A classic image of the revelation of the erotic potential of
feminine beauty is a glimpse of a woman's legs, particularly the image of the legs shown by the
upraised skirt, as in this painting. The down to earth character of the woman’s image in this painting
does not negate this erotic possibility.

The larger power of the painting derives from Rembrandt's characteristic use of light and shadow,
throwing flesh tones into relief through focusing light on a foreground, leaving the background in
deep colours that minimally reflect light. Also potent is his choice of and composition of the figure
in the painting.

The sheer dance of colour creates a balance between the translucence and shimmering variety of the
water’s reflections, the splendid robe on the bank of the stream, and the heavy, dark primary colours
of black and dark brown in the background. This intersection of contrastive colour schemes within
the same space further foregrounds the central figure of the woman, whose light skin contrasts
dramatically with the deeply shaded background.

Focusing the viewer's attention on the woman in the foreground, the light lingers on the dance
between levels of exposure of skin in relation to clothing, between the partially bared chest and the
exposed face, the partially exposed legs and the covering of the rest of the body. A critic
(“Rembrandt”, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1992, Micropedia, vol.9, 1018) sums up this technique of
Rembrandt’s in describing the painter as adapting his “forceful chiaroscuro [ extreme contrasts of
light and shadow] to depict his figures’ mood and inner mental life by a selective accentuation of
physical textures, modelling, facial expressions and pose”.

The downward look, quiet and trusting, may suggest not only Hendrickje’s trust in the person
painting her in this intimate scene but the fact that the water in the bath will remain water, will not
change its atomic constitution, and suddenly become glass, a primary requirement of human
engagement with the world, in which our reliance on the consistency of the laws of physics defines
our relationship with the universe. The painting may suggest not only this reliance on natural law,
but the woman's confidence in the person she has allowed to capture her in this sensitive and
vulnerable moment. Francis Bacon, the user name of a critic at the art discussion group
Wetcanvas.com, sums up the work’s correlative visual and emotional universe as projecting “a
sense of vulnerability, almost tragedy”, created partly through “strong tonal contrasts and the almost
monochromatic palette which gives it a pensive mood.”

Bacon suggests interpretive possibilities of the dialectic of bright light and deep shadow that shapes
the colour universe of the painting. This contrast foregrounds the woman’s image and reinforces the
impression of her thoughtful mood, suggesting an underlying layer of mental quiescence akin to
contemplation but in the context of the quickness of life evoked by the radiance of the skin in the
semi-erotic pose. Tom de Freston on the art site Whalecrow.co.uk sums up this mutually reinforcing
symbiosis between colour, figure and evocation of light: “Rembrandt sees the process of
representation as a way to celebrate different properties of his medium, the two are always
symbiotic, never at war”. For Tom, both paint and the subject represented through paint are
celebrated by Rembrandt. The paint is carefully and elegantly applied in the colourful radiance,
luminescent and shimmering of the water, and shaped in deeply layered strokes, as in the gradations
of shadow that constitute the background, even as this background opens into a void behind
Hendrick’s head, thereby underlining the sensuousness of the painting with a contemplative
suggestiveness that takes the work beyond its sensual foreground without detracting from the
immediacy of the suggestive skin tones of a woman ripe with the features of middle age. Tom
suggests this quality: “What amazes me about Rembrandt is his ability to transform paint into a wide
range of mimetic ends without ever losing the autonomous suculence of the paint itself. It always
reads as stick, sexy oil paint as well as its representational counterpart.”

This painting, like the great paintings of domestic scenes by Jan Vermeer, imbue the everyday and
the commonplace with a contemplative stillness, and suggest what, in Vermeer’s domestic paintings,
is a greater accomplishment in the actualisation of the possibilities of the conjunction of time and the
timeless. This hallowing of the quotidian domestic round is achieved by Vermeer in terms of a
meticulous realism, that, nevertheless, in its painstaking stillness within which motion is captured,
projects the sense of an instant of time made luminous within a gaze that penetrates from the
arrested common moment into an infinity of possibilities grounded in the concrete instant.

Jan Vermeer

The Kitchen Maid

The Britannica critic sums up a related quality in Rembrandt as a “solemnity, tenderness and
introspective depth” achieved through his “complete mastery of the technical aspects of his craft to
express such intangible values as humility, love and the philosophical acceptance of human frailty”,
describing these qualities as reaching their apogee in Rembrandt’s depictions of Biblical subjects.

A Woman Bathing in a Stream transforms the inanimate forms of colour and line into an immortal
evocation of a tender moment, thereby rendering that moment forever alive with embodied humanity
and vastness of meaning for the person who is sensitive to this recreation of human being in space.
 Acknowledgements

Thanks to Barron Burrow for his post of 15/08/2011 in the Literature group at Yahoo that inspired
this essay.

Image credits

Cover: Cluster of the yantras of the fifteen nityas, from sivasakti.net. Accessed 15/ 08/11.
Yantra of Bhagamalini by courtesy of Mike Magee at sivassaktimandalam. Accessed 15/ 08/11.
A Woman Bathing in a Stream, displayed at the National Gallery, London. Image from “A Woman
Bathing in a Stream” in Wikipedia. Accessed 15/08/2011

The Kitchen Maid from the Hamilton High School art site . Accessed 15/08/2011

References

Bacon, Francis, the user name of a critic at the art discussion group Wetcanvas.com. Accessed 15/
08/11.
Brown, G. Baldwin, at the Hellenica site http://www.mlahanas.de/. Accessed 15/ 08/11.
de Freston, Tom, on the art site Whalecrow.co.uk . Accessed 15/ 08/11.
“Rembrandt”, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1992,Micropedia, vol.9,1018
Scott, Anna, Flickr. Accessed 15/8/11.
Vigue. Jordi, Great Masters of Western Art.New York: Watson: Guptill, 2002. 209.
Wallace, Robert, The World of Rembrandt. New York: TIME/LIFE,1971. 118.