Video Portrait Comparison - Male vs Female

A nice video showing a comparison of drawing the face of a amle and female side by side

Artisitic potrayals of Woman Bathing in arts

Degas drew a great deal of criticism for his late pastel nudes. Women were rarely ever seen in the intimate act of bathing or dressing... even by their husbands... at least not women of higher social status. As such, it was immediately assumed that all of Degas' women were prostitutes. The use of expressive colors and textures..unexpected points of view...and odd croppings (influenced by photography)...made his work even more shocking to the audience of his time.



Two Young Women Bathing in the Woods
1929
Roland Oudot, French, 1897–1981


"Women bathing." Paul Cézanne did many pictures of nude women bathing during his career and the Ordrupgaard collection has a good example that the catalogue notes was "made in the context of other pictures, photographs, and reproductions of nude figures form the Musée du Louvre and in Cézanne's early drawings and sketches of work by Delacroix, Michelangelo, Puget and Rubens." "This frieze-like composition - vivid as it is in painterly terms - is just as artificial, construced, and conceptual as his strange early figure paintings. ...In Cézanne's work the spiritual, in the Symbolist sense, has no place, just as his Utopian vision includes neither concrete nor imagined physical reality. His bathers are a far cry from the nymphs and carefree nude figures found in the pictures of Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse. Cézanne's bathers are physically present but paradocially dispasionate and inactive. It is a concept of joie de vivre that lacks both joie and vivre."

Art Deco/ 1920's to 1930's

Art Deco is an elegant style of decorative art, design and architecture which began as a Modernist reaction against the Art Nouveau style. It is characterized by the use of angular, symmetrical geometric forms. One of the classic Art Deco themes is that of 1930s-era skyscrapers such as New York's Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. The former, designed by architect William Van Alen, is considered to be one of the world's great Art Deco style buildings.

The Art Deco look is related to the Precisionist art movement, which developed at about the same time.

Well-known artists within the Art Deco movement included Tamara de Lempicka,



'A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?)'

1654

REMBRANDT
1606 - 1669

NG54. Holwell Carr Bequest, 1831.

Signed and dated bottom right: Rembrandt f 1654

The model is probably Hendrickje Stoffels (about 1625/6 - 1663). She lived in Rembrandt's household from about 1649 until her death. She became his common-law wife and bore him a daughter, Cornelia, who was baptised on 30 October 1654 (the year of this painting). It has been suggested that the sumptuous red robe on the river bank indicates that the painting might be a sketch for a religious or mythological picture; the model might be in the guise of an Old Testament heroine, such as Susanna or Bathsheba, or the goddess Diana, who were all spied upon by men while bathing. However, there is no evidence for a completed painting after this work and, moreover, Rembrandt did not use oil sketches as preparation for larger-scale paintings.

The handling of the paint is unusually spontaneous. The picture appears unfinished in some parts, for example, in the shadow at the hem of the raised chemise, the right arm and the left shoulder, but it was clearly finished to Rembrandt's satisfaction since he signed and dated it.

Oil on oak
61.8 x 47 cm.


Oil on Canvas, Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Women Bathing
Completed in 1892





Mary Cassatt - Woman Bathing - Colored Drypoint and Aquatint - 1891
Print from Woman Artist Mary Cassatt