Seated Female Nude
1660/62
Medium
Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, with subtractive highlights (scraping) and touches of opaque white watercolor corrections, on ivory laid paper, laid down on cream laid card
Dimensions
Primary/secondary supports: 21.2 × 17.5 cm (8 3/8 × 6 15/16 in.)
Classification
pen and ink drawings
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
90536
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
For Rembrandt van Rijn, simple honesty of vision and sureness of line were far more important than the classical glorification of the nude. He focused on this subject only during certain phases of his career, and very few of the resulting studies, which he used to prepare biblical or mythological representations, survive today. This strong form is a late work, and one of only four extant drawings of the female nude attributed to Rembrandt with certainty. Unlike the almost scientific realism of h...
About the Artist
Rembrandt van Rijn · 1606–1669
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) stands as one of the greatest visual artists in the history of Western art and the most important Dutch painter of the 17th century. Born in Leiden to a prosperous miller's family, Rembrandt transformed painting through his revolutionary use of light and shadow, his psychological depth in portraiture, and his elevation of etching to a fine art. His approx...