woman toilet

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. 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. 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 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. 1441, it is accepted that neither is a forgery or wishful thinking. 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.Van Eyck's original was atypically daring and unusually erotic for a painting of the 1420s – early 1430s when it was presumably completed. 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. 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. 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".

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