Saskia Ill in Bed

Entry

There is a nearly identical drawing of a sick woman in bed in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1891,0713.8),¹ and it has long been assumed that the Amsterdam study is a copy after it. The Amsterdam version, drawn in pen over graphite, is less complete and precise, and there are many minor differences. In the London drawing, for instance, the pillow is larger at upper right; there are additional vertical lines at right indicating the bed’s hanging curtain; both hands (especially her right hand) are more fully resolved; and the hatching in the areas of shadow is different.

Although the rendering of form is considerably weaker in the museum’s drawing and its watermark points to a date from the end of the seventeenth century, it is by no means certain that the London drawing is either an original by Rembrandt for the direct prototype for the Amsterdam version. The British Museum drawing, with its fine and occasionally unsteady lines, is not of the same calibre as other autograph studies of Saskia in bed. It lacks Rembrandt’s typically suggestive sketchiness with which he gave volume to the forms. Although Royalton-Kisch considered the attribution to be a ‘borderline case’ (for he felt that the quality of the sketch was ‘high’), he conceded that Schatborn was probably right to conclude that the draughtsman of the London sheet was likely to be a follower, in his view, a pupil from the 1640s.

Both authors assumed that the follower responsible for the London study based his composition on the reversed motif of Saskia in bed in Rembrandt’s etched Study Sheet with a Sick Woman in Bed (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-773),² The pose of the head on the pillow and the figure’s outstretched arm are similar, but, as Schatborn noted, Saskia’s other hand is not concealed and may have been borrowed from another drawing. Could this prototype not have been a lost original sketch by Rembrandt, in reverse to his etched representation of Saskia in bed – and thus in the same sense as these two drawings? Could this not have been the direct model for both sheets? Such a source would explain both the remarkable similarities and the minor differences due to two different copyists.

Judging by the expression on her face in both versions, Saskia seems to be in pain. This may be an anachronism: Rembrandt never portrayed Saskia in this fashion. The melancholy mood of the representation of the figure in both drawings may be the result of the copyists’ knowledge that Saskia died young (1642).

Peter Schatborn/Jane Turner, 2018