I had someone send me a photo of this painting Bathsheba at her Toilet (1594) by Cornelis Corneliz van Haarlem in May and mention that the interpretive text along with the painting suggests that the character in front, one of Bathsheba’s maids, is trans
The text says - “The beautiful Bathsheba bathes out of doors assisted by two maidservants. King David spies the young woman from the roof of his palace and instantly falls in love. Although he is not depicted in the painting, David’s presence is suggested by the castle in the distance. Curiously, the servant seen from behind has a male body.”
As u can imagine I was both intrigued and confused by what the museum meant by that last bit, and as u can also imagine i just went right ahead and emailed them to find out.
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was unsurprisingly unaware of the connotations of their interpretive text and that they were accidentally hinting at the figure being trans.
Speaking to one of the curators at Rijksmuseum they said that “Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem often used ‘male’ features in his representation of ‘female’ bodies.” which only raises further questions
Apparently this has to do with the style of Dutch Mannerism at the time which was heavily influenced by Italian Mannerism, and this style had men and women painted in different tones - women more pale and dumpy and men more tanned and heroic-looking.
Cornelisz van Haarlem’s work does follow this but overall he seems to paint women in a less than flattering light, which is likely due to the very homoerotic nature of his paintings from this period due to his patron Jacob Rauwaert.
I won’t go into a major breakdown of how homoerotic his work is as that has already been done by Arthur Lublow for the New York Times in the article The Lusty Creativity of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem which i fully suggest u read
In case u don’t tho the TL:DR version is he painted many men as very hunky, and for the theydies and gentlethems of the jury i present my only evidence for this, The Fall of Lucifer (1588)
So based on this we can begin to see what Rijksmuseum means as we can see similarities between the way Cornelisz van Haarlem paints men and how he has painted the woman in the front of Bathsheba at her Toilet. Rijksmuseum also pointed this similarity out in the painting The Massacre of Innocents (1590) where if we hone in on the woman in yellow we can see she has more muscular proportions than the other women in the painting, she is holding the man on the floors’ arm as other women clamour towards him to massacre him.
We can see that these two anaemic queens look pretty similar actually and could even be the same woman.
So why are they both a little more muscular?
It could be as simple as he used the same model in both paintings and she happened to be muscular. After all cis women can also be muscle queens 🤷♀️ and we stan a femme muscle queen who can boots the bathhouse down
Thats a boring position to start from though and we need more investigations that look into history and art history with the starting point of what if they were trans.
What in this painting would suggest she is trans?
Well after like 250 years of the classical beauty of the renaissance, mannerism was becoming popular for its fresh style, challenging artists techniques and its tendency towards a slightly more grotesque vibe. If u look at mannerist paintings they all have some slightly odd feature and I believe Bathsheba at her Toilet is no exception
The story of Bathsheba is that King David was on the roof of his palace when he saw her bathing (yes that line from Hallelujah is about her!) and in the painting we can see the palace in the background which suggests that that ol’ peeping tom, or peeping david in this case, is watching her.
The ~visual language~ at use here is to make Bathsheba look like the beauty she is described as being and the best way to do that is to stick her next to things that would have been considered ugly at the time, i.e - a black woman and a ‘manly’ looking woman 🙃
The statue in the middle ground could be Iris or Hebe, both are often mistaken for each other due to their visual similarities such as their pitcher and being associated with water and pools. Hebe being the goddess of beauty and youth, and Iris being the goddess of messages and the personification of the rainbow. The former being the most likely to symbolise how beautiful Bathsheba is, altho by proxy this should also communicate that the servants are also beautiful by being placed in that pool but I doubt these crusty men were thinking that when they were trying to find establish a ~visual language~ in painting
Anyway yeah the overt racism and transphobia in the painting is what ultimately the painting is about, i’m not here to cancel some dutch painter from 1500s tho i’m just here to understand the painting and highlight this stuff.
Obvs the racism, or even if we stretch (physiotherapist at the ready pls…) it to being exoticisation, its grim. I don’t know enough about colonialism in regards to the netherlands and the dutch slave trade to unpack that further but if that is ur jam then i’m happy to talk more about that with ppl so hit me up.
As for the transphobia specifically, do i hate it? Well no actually
This is one of those times where the transphobia becomes the representation and also where we need to understand that transphobia doesn’t just impact trans ppl but the fact that this could be a cis woman who is just muscular and has a body shape that isn’t considered the norm and she has this idea of having a ‘male’ body pinned on her, which anyway u slice it is misogynistic
If we do work from the starting point that the figure is trans then we also find it oddly inclusive within that transphobia because Bathsheba would not have been bathed by a man, so being attended by a trans woman is still Bathsheba (or the painter, or whoever is interpreting the painting) saying that 📣 trans women are women 📣
We should also take into account the ~visual language~ of the homoeroticism and queer flagging Cornelisz van Haarlem’s paintings around this time. Turning biblical and classical scenes into homoerotic art for a patron will have had a blind eye turned to it as the biblical and classical subject matter often covered this homoerotica up and allowed it to pass relatively unnoticed at the time. Like look at how many gay and queer men had paintings of St Sebastian
The inclusion of a muscular or trans woman could have also been a way of flagging queerness for his patron being cleverly disguised as just a mannerist quirk in a painting.
So its time to wrap this up and conclude. Is the figure trans? Yeah if u want her to be and no if u don’t think she is. The beauty of this is that the figure is so open to interpretation as we don’t see any defining ‘sex characteristics’ other than the vague shape of a body. Its the potential for transness that matters, not sticking any particular flag on it.
Personally I love the idea of Bathsheba at her Toilet fitting into a loose trans art history as much as it could fit into any of the categories of art history it falls into, but thats just me. I’ll let u make up ur own mind :)