Rembrandt's Women

National Gallery of Scotland
Edinburgh 8 June–2 Sept 2001

A curiously gauche title this, for a great coup of an exhibition by Edinburgh. Could this be further 'marketing' small talk? However, the National Galleries' Director-General Tim Clifford is surely to be congratulated for what we see before us. Works assembled from over 40 museums around the world, including some 30 paintings and over 40 etchings and drawings. The art historical scholarship here is concerned with Rembrandt's own method as applied to this genre. Rembrandt cherished 'his women' in painting them, as well as seeking out and discreetly expressing their voluptuousness.

In a superb, extended pictorial essay entitled 'The Presence of the Past' (Studio International, Volume l95, No 996, l982) the painter, novelist and critic John Berger addressed the attachment of Rembrandt to one woman in particular — Hendrickje Stoffels. As those portraits by Rembrandt of her demonstrate (and Berger illustrates five that are identified as Stoffels from the Norton Simon Collection, the Frankfurt Stadtische Galerie, from Dahlem, Berlin, from the Louvre, and from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) the most beguiling is that entitled 'Woman in Bed' from the National Gallery, Edinburgh (though not formally attributed). Of this, (in the exhibition) Berger says:

"There is a painting that belongs to this story, where the presence of Rembrandt is almost palpable: Rembrandt the man, as distinct from Rembrandt the painter. By my reckoning it was painted a little before or a little after the birth of their daughter Cornelia. The historians suggest that it may have been a fragment taken from a larger work representing the wedding night of 'Sarah and Tobias'. Perhaps. But if so, the subject was no more than an alibi. Even if it is a fragment, it is certain that Rembrandt finished it, and bequeathed it finally to the spectator as his most intimate painting of the woman he loved.

‘At first sight the painting of Hendrickje in bed is, in every sense of the word, more modest. One feels how, between the man and the woman, a complicity of reticence has been established, a reticence which belongs to the day and not to the night. The curtain that Hendrickje is lifting with her hand marks the threshold between the two.’ (See Studio archive, Berger/Rembrandt.)

It is fortunate indeed that Edinburgh, home of this portrait, has seen fit to assemble the myriad female likenesses of several cherished companions of Rembrandt, and, furthermore, that the curator of the exhibition Julia Lloyd Williams herself, is prepared to credit Rembrandt with an appropriate inventiveness to supplement the verisimilitude of familiarity. It is still open to the viewer to reach his or her final conclusion to the riddle of the true identity of the ‘Woman in Bed’, upon which a properly Scottish verdict of 'not proven' still rests. It is, however, almost impossible not to agree with John Berger that this is indeed Hendrickje Stoffels.

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Rembrandt van Rijn. A woman in bed, 1645

READERS COMMENTS

This sort of speculation is the preserve of medical antiquarians, rather than of historians who work on medicine.

Doctors who are amateur historians usually start from the assumption that diseases are the same at all times and that it is diseases that are the subject of interest. Thus, they tend to ask if a particular epidemic was "really" the plague -- as defined in the laboratory by Yersin.

Some professional historians of medicine who were originally trained as doctors, biographers, Freudians, and historians primarily trained or interested in other fields, also take this approach. Far, far more has been written speculating about the modern identity of the Plague of Athens than survives from that time.

Historians start from the assumption that the descriptions and the diagnoses are normally incommensurable with modern ones. The same is true of visual depictions. All such representations are theory-laden, and select or produce what is expected. The same is true of a medical encounter today. Buboes may be obvious, but it will not do to ignore all the other symptoms, which fail to fit our laboratory definition.

Historians of medicine are primarily interested in people, use language and gesture to convey meaning, and who create and interact with ideas and institutions. Thus, when an affliction is defined by a doctor as "the plague" or "the tertian ague", the issues are what did that mean to the patient, to the people around the patient, and to the doctor.

What did the patient, the family, the clergy, the doctor, and the local authorities think appropriate? The different responses will depend upon the specific beliefs and social circumstances of each, rather than on generalities drawn by the historian from some textbook of the day, let alone one in use now.

For the doctor, a retrospective diagnosis is an exercise in self-congratulation, showing the superiority of modern medicine or the ornamental erudition of the particular doctor. For the historian of medicine, it is an after-dinner game, of little or no serious relevance.

Neither approach is better than the other. They have different disciplinary settings. Art is an interesting source for what Dutch painters and their public thought about doctors and patients. It does not show us what the world would look like, to our eyes or even to theirs. It is always artful.

- Dav id Harley, South Bend, IN, USA

I wish you had put pictures of Rembrandt's woman in here, and as for the question about how Stoffels died, Wikipedia thinks that she died of the plague:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrickje_Stoffels
sincerely: Giordano Bruno

- Giordano Bruno, seattle Washington, USA

There is something interesting that art-historians don't know about. In 1967,an italian doctor T. C. Greco saw "bathsheba at her bath" for which Stoffels was the supposed model. He noticed the left breast to be swollen and disfigured. He wrote an article in an Italian journal saying that Stoffels had died of cancer breast. Several medical detectives have attempted to unravel the mystery of Stoffels' left breast but nobody has conclusively proved anything. TB (Saskia died of tuberculosis), lactational mastitis, galactorrhea, cancer breast and plague are the possible candidates for her death. I would request any historian to contribute thoughts on this subject.

- Dr. Debashish Nayak, Pondicherry, India

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