Woman Kneeling before a Man

Entry

Traditionally, this drawing was considered to be a depiction of the Shunammite woman kneeling before the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 4: 8-36). After her son’s death, the Shunammite woman implored Elisha to come to her house, where Elisha brought the boy back to life. There are two moments in the story during which the mother kneels before the prophet. The first, and by far the most dominant in the pictorial tradition, is when she throws herself at his feet soon after learning of her son’s death, while Elisha’s servant Gehazi tries to hold her back (2 Kings 4:27). The second is when she bows down at the prophet’s feet in gratitude after the boy’s resurrection (2 Kings 4:37). In renditions of the first scene, the servant Gehazi is often depicted, as is the prophet’s staff, which was instrumental in bringing the boy back to life.³ Both those elements are missing in this drawing, and the woman is not bowing down to the ground, either. The traditional identification is thus untenable and the absence of attributes makes it difficult to identify any specific story that Bol may have had in mind.⁴

The drawing was attributed to Rembrandt and to an anonymous Rembrandt student for some time, until Werner Sumowski placed it in the oeuvre of Ferdinand Bol in 1979. He dated it to circa 1636, the early phase of Bol’s activity in Rembrandt’s workshop, but Bol likely executed it around 1640, towards the end of his stay. Stylistic comparisons can be made with Bol’s Hagar and the Angel from circa 1640 (inv. no. RP-T-1930-27), especially in the energetic hands and the combination of thick contours and delicate pen lines for details, and the Swooning Woman Supported by Two Figures from circa 1640 (inv. no. RP-T-1930-26), particularly in the boldness of the draftsmanship and the dense horizontal squiggles delineating the shaded passages in the woman’s sleeve.

As Benesch first noticed, the same kneeling woman is found in the figure of Manoah’s wife in Bol’s drawing The Angel Appearing to Manoah and his Wife in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, which is dated to the 1640s (inv. no. 1484).⁵ Whereas Benesch thought that the present drawing is a repetition of the Budapest work, Sumowski rightly suggested that it is the other way around. Indeed, the woman’s body in the Amsterdam drawing has more volume, especially in her right shoulder and hips. The lines in the Rijksmuseum figure are also more searching, and there are pentimenti in the woman’s left hand and the right contours of her dress. In the Budapest drawing, Bol better defined some passages that posed a problem to him in the Amsterdam work, such as the woman’s feet and her left hand.

Interestingly, the figure group of the angel, Manoah and his wife in the Budapest work goes back to a drawing by Govert Flinck of the same subject in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (inv. no. R8 (PK)), which he created under Rembrandt’s tutelage in circa 1633-35.⁶ In Flinck’s drawing, Manoah’s wife is the one standing next to her kneeling husband, rather than the one kneeling. Bol’s drawing in the Rijksmuseum thus appears to have had a direct function in the process of turning Flinck’s composition into his own, focusing specifically on the kneeling woman. It should be regarded as an exercise rather than the depiction of a specific scene, one that he could revisit and reuse in other, more elaborate compositions. Bol’s Swooning Woman Supported by two Figures in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1930-26) functioned in much the same way.

Bonny van Sighem, 2000/Ilona van Tuinen, 2018