![]() In 1456, the Italian humanist Bartolomeo Facio described a panel in the collection of Ottaviano della Carda, a nephew of Federico da Montefeltro. Two other possible works by van Eyck of this style are known from descriptions only. An orange rests on the windowsill and there are discarded pattens on the floor in the lower left corner. Her bedchamber is richly detailed there is a wooden bed to the right, a tall folding chair against the back wall, and wooden beams running across the ceiling. In the tradition of such scenes, the mirror symbolises virtue and purity, while the dog in the lower center at the woman's feet – barely visible in the Fogg panel due to loss of paint, but more distinguishable in van der Geest's work – represents her fidelity. A convex mirror hangs from a central bar in the shuttered window above the basin, and shows the reflection of both figures. The woman preserves her modesty with a wash cloth held in her left hand as she reaches with her right towards a basin placed on a side-table. It shows a nude woman taking a sponge bath in an interior setting accompanied by a maid in a red gown. Art historians have sought in vain to attach to either a biblical or classical source the rapes of Bathsheba or Susanna have been suggested, although Judith is sometimes seen a more likely source, but the clues apply only to the Antwerp panel, traditionally known as "Judith Beautifying Herself".ĭetail: Willem van Haecht, Art-Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, 1628 Until the emergence of the Fogg copy around 1969, it was known mostly through its appearance in Willem van Haecht's expansive 1628 painting The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, a view of a collector's gallery which contains many other identifiable old masters. Apart from its own qualities, it is interesting to art historians due to the many similarities of the Harvard panel to his famous 1434 London Arnolfini Portrait. Van Eyck's original was atypically daring and unusually erotic for a painting of the 1420s – early 1430s when it was presumably completed. Art historians broadly consider it likely that both were copied from a single source, that is, one is not a copy of the other, and that both originate from roughly the same period. 1441, it is accepted that neither is a forgery or wishful thinking. The attribution of either panel to an original by van Eyck is usually not contested while it may be doubted whether either copy was completed until one or two generations after his early death c. ![]() It is unique in van Eyck's known oeuvre for portraying a nude in secular setting, although there is mention in two 17th-century literary sources of other now lost but equally erotic van Eyck panels. The work is today known through two copies which diverge in important aspects one in Antwerp and a more successful but small c 1500 panel in Harvard University's Fogg Museum, which is in poor condition. Woman Bathing (or Woman at Her Toilet, sometimes Bathsheba at Her Toilet) is a lost panel painting by the Early Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck. Woman at Her Toilet, early 16th-century copy by an unknown Netherlandish artist, 27.2 x 16.3 cm.
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