Bathsheba Bathing

It is possible that Bathsheba was not bathing naked. While images of a nude Bathsheba are far more widespread than those of her bathing clothed (Vadillo 2008: 40), there are several illustrations of her fully dressed, and only bathing her feet. The German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, for example, painted such an image of Bathsheba in 1526 (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), and that image inspired this lithograph by Pablo Picasso. Working on a zinc plate, Picasso scraped out thirteen states—the different forms a plate takes while being produced for printmaking—between 1947 and 1949, printing various impressions as he proceeded.

Picasso adopted Cranach’s composition with King David and his attendants on a balcony watching Bathsheba get her feet washed by an assistant in a pool below the palace. In Picasso’s version, Bathsheba and the other women wear the sixteenth-century attire of Cranach’s time, including hats with distinctive slanted brims.

But Picasso notably altered Cranach’s composition in two significant places. First, while Cranach’s painting merely hints at the servant’s cleavage, Picasso depicted the servant’s breasts falling out of her dress. The servant’s exposure contrasts with Bathsheba’s modesty: as is typical in these images of Bathsheba bathing clothed, Picasso has shown only her foot and ankle as bare. Second, Picasso represented David with a disproportionately large, almost monstrous head. While Cranach’s David looks down intently at the bath, Picasso’s leers menacingly over the wall.

The threat of David’s power, of David’s position, of David’s gaze, is all the more vividly expressed because of its contrast with Bathsheba’s innocent and decorous bath.

References

Walker Vadillo, Monica Ann. 2008. Bathsheba in Late Medieval French Manuscript Illumination: Innocent Object of Desire or Agent of Sin? (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen)

Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French painter already known for his other images of bathing women—such as La Grande piscine à Brusa (1885)—made Bathsheba the subject of this 1899 painting.

The Bible does not specify the type of Bathsheba’s bath: it could, for example, have been a ritual bath given the mention of purification in 2 Samuel 11:2, though several English translations simply say that Bathsheba was ‘washing herself’.

Gérôme shows it as a more quotidian bath, though located in a rather spectacular setting on a roof terrace in the open air. A female servant kneels in front of Bathsheba, assisting with her bath. (While no servant is mentioned in the biblical story, the artistic interpretations of Bathsheba’s bath often include one or two assistants.) Bathsheba stands washing herself on a richly hued green and red rug, colours which mirror the plants and flowers to her left. Bathsheba’s own naked body is pale white and rosy pink, complementing the shades of pink and gold in the sky, as well as the colours on the light in the buildings in the distance. This scene seems to be set at sunset (as 2 Samuel 11:2 indicates, the bath took place ‘late one afternoon’).

This is a sensual painting without necessarily being seductive: Bathsheba is enjoying the water and fresh air on her body after the heat of the day. She is exposing herself to the city, but those buildings are too far away from her for anyone to see her clearly. Only her assistant—and David, who is almost an afterthought in the top left of the composition—could see her frontal nudity.

While David’s body language suggests some surprise at seeing Bathsheba, at this moment she is not aware that he is watching her. Because this happens at ‘the time when the kings go out to war’ (2 Samuel 11:1), Bathsheba would not expect David the king to be present in Jerusalem. She takes pleasure in her own body and the sensation of her bath for its own sake.

One of the most overtly seductive images of Bathsheba is found in the Book of Hours of Louis XII (c.1498–1499), in which court painter Jean Bourdichon depicted her in a deliberately provocative manner. She is explicitly, even graphically naked: though she is immersed in water to her hips, her genitalia are visible under the water (Kren 2005: 44). Bourdichon may have included some bawdy humour by painting a cat as the spout of the fountain in which Bathsheba is bathing, because chatte meant ‘prostitute’ in the French slang of that time (ibid: 57–58).

Bathsheba frequently appeared in Books of Hours from the medieval era. These private prayer books, which allowed laypeople to follow along with the church’s canonical hours of prayer, included the seven penitential Psalms as a standard part of their liturgy. The superscription to Psalm 51 introduces it as ‘a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him after he went to Bathsheba’. Illustrations of Psalm 51 in Books of Hours often included images of Bathsheba bathing, suggesting that was the catalyst which necessitated David’s penance. 

In Bourdichon’s version, David is visible in the upper left corner of the illumination, watching Bathsheba from the window of the palace beyond the garden wall. The direction of Bathsheba’s eyes, turned to the right while she cocks her head to the left, suggests she is aware of his gaze. But David would not be able to see much from his vantage point; only her back would be visible, with her hair covering even that.

Louis XII, who was infamous for his infidelity and sexual appetite, likely enjoyed and was titillated by this view of Bathsheba (Kren 2005: 57). Now we—the contemporary viewers—are the voyeurs of this Bathsheba, who is presenting herself openly, even brazenly, to us. Such a view depicts her bath as a seduction and her as a seductress.

References

Kren, Thomas. 2005. ‘Looking at Louis XII’s Bathsheba’, in A Masterpiece Constructed: The Hours of Louis XII, ed. by Thomas Kren and Mark Evans (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum)