Against the Mirror: Indeterminacy and the Poetics of Painting in Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream
Journal: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art
Year: 2024

Rembrandt van Rijn’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654; The National Gallery, London) defies neat categorization. Although painted with loose, vigorous brushwork and prominently unfinished passages that suggest an informal study, the painting is signed and dated, indicating that it is a completed work. Its subject is similarly ambiguous, straddling a genre scene and a narrative representation. This article embraces these indeterminacies as purposeful and argues that Rembrandt’s play with early m