Jan van Noordt

This moving nude study of a young woman clearly relates to a significant number of nude studies executed by a group of Amsterdam artists in the late 1650s and 1660s, who probably met as a group to make drawings from the same model. The leading members of this group were Govert Flinck and Jacob Backer, but others, including Jacob van Loo and Backer’s pupil Jan van Noordt were clearly also there.  

The closest stylistic comparisons with the present drawing can in fact be found in certain nudes by Jan van Noordt, notably one in the collection of the P. & N. de Boer Foundation, showing the same model but in a somewhat different pose, which can be reasonably securely attributed to him on the basis of its connection with a painting by the artist, in the Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco.¹ The subject of the San Francisco painting is Susannah and the Elders, one of no fewer than three paintings by Van Noordt of this subject; the others are in Utrecht and Leipzig.²  The air of vulnerability and defensive pose seen both in the De Boer Collection drawing and in the present work fit well with the subject of Susannah, and it is likely that the latter was also made as part of an exploration of this theme. In terms of pose, the drawing is closest to the painting in Leipzig, in which the figure is shown as if in the process of recoiling from the advances of the Elders. A drawing in Hannover can also be associated with this version of the painting.³ 

Also worth noting is the intriguing suggestion that the model seen here was actually a woman of colour. 

1. Painting and drawing both reproduced, Rembrandt’s Naked Truth, Drawing Nude Models in the Golden Age, exh. cat., Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 2016, pp. 158-9

2. Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent, on loan from the Instituut Collectie Nederland, inv. NK 1700; and Leipzig, Museum der Bildende Künste, inv. 1636; David A. de Witt, Jan van Noordt, Montreal/London/Ithaca 2007, pp. 98-102, nos. 6 and 7 respectively

3. Hannover, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, inv. 134 (as Jacob Backer); De Witt, op. cit., p. 290, no. D2