Three Scribes / recto: Study of a Woman’s Legs

Entry

There are very few drawings by Rembrandt that can be connected with his paintings. This sheet is an exception (as are inv. nos. RP-T-1947-213 and RP-T-1896-A-3172). The sketch on what is now considered its verso⁴ – a study for three scribes under a curtain – played an important role in the evolution of Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, dated 1629, now in an English private collection.⁵ Two further sheets of studies survive for this, Rembrandt’s most important Leiden-period painting: a compositional study of figures surrounding a priest in pen and wash, formerly in the Albertina in Vienna, and now in a private collection,⁶ which has a recently revealed study of a standing and a kneeling figure on its verso,⁷ and a black chalk study of Two Scribes on the verso of a double-sided sheet in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (inv. no. R 89 verso (PK)).⁸ The newly discovered faint sketch on the verso of the compositional study is apparently related to the kneeling figure of Judas and the standing high priest. Since Rembrandt probably started working on the painting in 1628, all four known studies for it can be dated to that year or to the beginning of 1629. Another drawing of the subject is mentioned in the catalogue of the Lawrence collection and subsequently in the auction catalogue of the Esdaile collection,⁹ from which it was purchased by Andrew Geddes: ‘Judas laying the thirty pieces of silver before the high priest, who is seated under a canopy to the right, the members of the council around him... a very grand design; from the collection of Zoomer of Amsterdam’. However, since Rembrandt never made ‘grand designs’, this was probably no more than a copy of the painting.

There was no firm iconographic tradition for the representation of Judas Repentant,¹⁰ and Rembrandt, in his search for an appropriate narrative, used both the canvas and the various drawings to explore different solutions as the painting evolved toward the final composition, which strongly emphasized Judas’s acute feelings of repentance.¹¹ The work had a complex gestation, as can be deduced from X-radiographs that show a number of important changes made during the course of its execution.¹² Rembrandt had apparently initially envisaged the high priest seated on an elevated throne, below a heavy curtain, in the upper left-hand area of the painting, where X-radiographs show an open space below the curtain; Rembrandt then decided to move the high priest more towards the centre of the composition and to have him standing, but, as our drawing shows, he initially wanted to retain the curtain. The sketch of Two Scribes in Rotterdam probably immediately follows the Amsterdam drawing and seems to reflect the artist’s decision to separate the seated scribes from the standing priest (who was obliterated with opaque white on the Amsterdam verso, though over time he has become visible again due to abrasion). The compositional drawing in the private collection – probably made after the painting was well underway – seems to be a subsequent version of the whole composition in which the curtain is completely left out. Two of the scribes in our drawing are now seated in the background and the standing figure has been moved to the right. As a result, very little of the composition of our drawing survives in the painting, in which most of the light falls on the open book at the left, and the seated figure at the lower centre of our sheet turns towards Judas, a movement that connects the previous action of reading the book with the new action involving Judas.

In drawing the verso, Rembrandt started with pen and brown ink and then added wash in the same yellow-brown ink – a special compound, as can be clearly seen from the grains of pigment in the lightly brushed areas.¹³ Opaque white was used not only to cover the whole of the standing figure, but also to lighten the chair and to adjust the profile of the foreground figure. The very sketchy lines sometimes end in a dot, a feature we often see in Rembrandt’s work. The wash is characteristically transparent so that the paper shines through and the brushstrokes always remain visible. In this respect, the sheet is similar to the only known landscape drawing from the Leiden period, a view of a town gate, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (inv. no. 2138).¹⁴ Rembrandt also skilfully conveyed differences in tone, which is evident in both the pen lines and the brushstrokes.

In the middle of what is now considered the recto (fig. a, inv. no. RP-T-1930-54(R)) is the depiction of a pair of half-draped legs, presumed to be those of a woman; one leg is covered, the other is bare. It was made in red chalk and the exposed knee heightened with white; then the right foot was given an even tone over the red chalk. In several places the red chalk was moistened with the tongue, which, unlike using a brush with wash, preserves the structure of the chalk. Darkening areas to give them depth was called ‘deepening’, and Rembrandt used this method behind the knee and under the drapery. The combination of the dark areas with detailed treatment of the exposed leg and the sketchy style of the rest of the drawing result in making the leg stand out strongly. In order to improve its representation and to define the context of the lower half of the figure’s body and to distinguish it from the undrawn torso and more drapery, Rembrandt drew a vertical loop above the figure’s right knee and two curved horizontal lines above both legs, guidelines that do not seem to portray anything in particular but improve the composition as a whole. In addition, there is a short horizontal line through the figure’s proper right foot, probably the edge of a low platform on which the heel of the other foot is resting.

The motif of a platform on which models in the studio are placed occurs in a number of Rembrandt’s paintings, including two with which the recto study has been related, the Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver and a work of the previous year, the Samson and Delilah, dated 1628, in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (inv. no. 812A).¹⁵ The drawing of legs has generally been seen as a preparatory study for the figure of Delilah in the Berlin painting,¹⁶ but I would now term it ‘indirectly preparatory’. Rembrandt often drew motifs or part of motifs as exercises, perhaps with a painting in mind, but not always with an immediate purpose. In the case of the study of legs, it seems to me that he conceived of the legs as an exercise for a female figure rather than for a man. In a recent monographic exhibition devoted to the genesis of the Judas painting,¹⁷ Per Rumberg, on the other hand, argued (less plausibly in my opinion) that the legs in the study are those of a man and that the pose, with legs slightly apart, is more closely related to that of the high priest in the Judas painting than to the pose of Delilah, who kneels on one leg in the Berlin painting. He further connected the two parallel looped chalk strokes above the legs with the belt worn by the high priest in the Judas painting. By contrast, Martin Royalton-Kisch¹⁸ was tempted to date the study of legs somewhat later, too late to have functioned in the preparation of either painting, for he saw the handling as comparable to some drawings that Rembrandt made in red chalk as late as circa 1635-37.¹⁹

Peter Schatborn, 2017