Drawing Female Nudes

Beginning in the late 1640s and 1650s, artists in Amsterdam broke with convention by commissioning sex workers to pose nude.

Ferdinand Bol’s Reclining Female Nude Seen from Behind, currently on view at the Getty Center, is a prime example of this new artistic practice. This work was part of a group of 20 drawings that were bound together in one album dating from the late 17th century. They all seem to have originated from live drawing sessions during which artists sketched the same naked model from different angles. (Interestingly, almost all of these artists favored black and white chalk on blue paper or red chalk on white paper.)

From Rembrandt’s Studio to Informal Drawing Sessions

Drawing “after life” was an integral part of Rembrandt’s teaching practice, and his pupils were expected to emulate both their master’s style and technique. He made his more advanced students pose for each other while wearing only a loincloth. During the late 1630s and 1640s, Rembrandt occasionally hired women to pose seminude, usually exposing only their chests and stomachs. As an advanced pupil in Rembrandt’s studio from 1630 to around 1640, Bol would have participated in these life drawing sessions.

During the late 1640s and 1650s, after Bol had left Rembrandt’s studio, a group of artists in Amsterdam started to organize regular informal drawing sessions for which they hired sex workers to pose nude. Even though sex work was illegal during Rembrandt and Bol’s time, the profession was flourishing—perhaps because it offered women the potential to earn three times the amount of money they could make from legal work. Several court documents prosecuting women have survived and provide further details about how artists had sex workers sit for them. The oldest dates from 1648 and states that the artist Govert Flinck painted three sisters “as stark naked as one could possibly be, lying asleep on a pillow in a most indecent manner.” A second, well-known document from July 27, 1658, mentions a group of painters, including Bol and Flinck, who officially declared that Catarina Jans—who was being prosecuted for sex work—posed for them stark naked.

Both Bol and Flinck had trained with Rembrandt, and his studio practice likely inspired them to hire female models. Unlike Rembrandt, however, they had the sitters pose fully unclothed. Rembrandt seems to have been inspired by these clandestine drawing sessions organized by some of his most successful former pupils, because from the late 1650s onwards, he also hired women to pose fully naked.

Imperfection versus Idealization

Apart from having these women pose fully nude, Bol and Flinck also took this opportunity to turn away from Rembrandt’s style. Unlike his contemporaries, Rembrandt rendered women as natural as possible, showing puckered or dimpled flesh and sagging breasts and bellies. Bol, however, sought to perfect the female form. Through subtle modeling, he depicted more elegant and idealized female nudes.

This contrast becomes particularly clear when comparing Rembrandt’s Nude Woman Lying on a Pillow with Bol’s Reclining Female Nude Seen from Behind. Bol used black chalk to render the woman’s contours and created volume by employing white heightening on the left side of her body in contrast with the dark shadows that sculpt her spine and lower back. The blue paper, in combination with the carefully blended white and black chalks, creates a marblelike smoothness of skin, particularly apparent in the buttocks and upper thigh. The polished appearance of the woman’s skin is further heightened by the absence of any imperfections, such as dimples or wrinkles. Bol’s reclining female nude is a highly idealized figure, as evidenced by the bare minimum of skin folds as seen in the bend of her knee.

Rembrandt’s reclining nude is rendered in a much coarser way and is significantly less crafted to perfection than Bol’s. Whereas Bol focused primarily on the texture of the woman’s smooth skin, Rembrandt instead emphasized her contours and how her body was affected by gravity. By applying a darker shadow underneath the woman’s left arm, for instance, Rembrandt emphasized how it rested on her upper thigh. Similarly, the shadow below her breasts helps shape her sagging stomach, which Rembrandt further emphasized with skin creases and folds. As a result, Rembrandt’s reclining nude, with her natural imperfections, appears more lifelike than Bol’s highly idealized woman. This impression is further emphasized by the pose of both reclining figures. Bol’s nude reclines elegantly; Rembrandt’s nude slouches forward, as if she has fallen asleep while posing, and is about to roll over.

While one might assume that Rembrandt’s naturalistic style was particularly appreciated in the context of drawing after life, contemporaries in fact preferred the more aesthetically pleasing manner in which artists like Bol rendered female nudes. And it is precisely this idealization of the female nude that would set the standard for later 18th-century nude studies, such as those by the French artist François Boucher.