Bathsheba At The Toilet Poem by gershon hepner

While a servant combs her hair
a gentleman, I would presume,
performs a pedicure, and bare,
she fondles her right breast. The doom
of David follows his seduction
of Bathsheba, or should we say
that she had planned his introduction
into her bed? With her display
of beauty, bathing on her roof
once her hair was styled and toes
were painted, I presume again,
the artist very clearly shows
that she was thinking how all men
would love to take her in their arms,
and fondle part of her that she
was fondling. Cheating never harms,
she seems to think. However we
reflect on how the visit to
the beauty salon ended. Though
she knows adultery will follow,
and may accept this, does she know
there’ll be a murder we can’t swallow?
David’s life before he met her
was almost perfect, but he’d spoil it
when Bathsheba, while getting wetter,
almost flushed him down the toilet.

Inspired by a portrait of Bathsheba discussed by Holland Cotter in the NYT, January 9,2009 (“In the Gloom, Seeing Rembrandt With New Eyes”) . Revisiting the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum he compares the slump in the economy that affects the world today with the collapse of the art market that affected Rembrandt:
In the 17th century the Netherlands was the most prosperous country in Europe. Then at midpoint of the century, partly because of a draining war, the bubble burst. The Dutch art market, at its zenith, collapsed. People thought, “Oh, it’s just a phase.” It wasn’t. The golden age of Dutch art was over. Rembrandt was hit especially hard. A decade earlier he had been a star, with a client waiting list a mile long. Amsterdam, like New York today, was a town of culture-craving burghers who had to have - had to have - a Rembrandt in their homes. So he turned himself into an art machine, piled on assistants to finish off work, and became very rich. He also grew careless. He mortgaged himself to the hilt. In addition to making art, he sold it, not only dealing his own work but that of other artists. He bought a Rubens and flipped it at a markup. He flogged paintings by his apprentices that looked very much like his own. With the economic slump, everything fell apart. Creditors banged at the door; clients disappeared. He was broke, out of fashion, a loser. If other artists believed it was just a matter of time before the Dutch market recovered, my guess is that Rembrandt did not. At least he didn’t paint as if he did. He had lost too much. He went his own way. I thought of this on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Dutch painting galleries a few days ago. I hadn’t spent time with these pictures since the Met’s “Age of Rembrandt” show in 2007, which had, to be honest, sated my appetite for this art. But art changes all the time, according to what’s going on around it. Now I was looking at Dutch painting from inside an economic collapse, with a market on the rocks, and a Gilded Age revealed as fool’s gold. The art looked different. I was particularly struck by how different the Rembrandts appeared, but then I always am. They’re like friends you’ve known for so long and so well that you figure there can’t be any surprises, but there are. They’re never quite the same twice. I don’t experience this with Vermeer. The Vermeers I carry around in my head correspond pretty closely to those I re-encounter on the wall. Is it because each composition is so precisely resolved, each object so exactly placed, each figure so cleanly shaped that they fix themselves in the mind the way rhymed poetry or worked-out thoughts do? I don’t know, but with Rembrandt it’s not the same. For example, I tend to remember the sitter in his portrait of the ebony worker Herman Doomer (1640) as a young man, though he’s not. With his smiling eyes and wide-brimmed hat, he has a youthful look, but he was in his mid to late 40s when the likeness was painted. In later portraits Rembrandt seems to age his sitters prematurely. But in this one, done when his life and career were still flying high, no. Seeing the picture called “The Toilet of Bathsheba” (1643) also took me by surprise, maybe because a later Bathsheba picture, the one in the Louvre dated 1654, stays so firmly in mind. Both related to the same biblical story: a beautiful young wife is preparing for a liaison with her lover, King David, which will lead to the death of the husband she is betraying. In the Louvre painting the nude woman is lost in sad reverie, as if already filled with regret for what she is about do. The mood of the Met picture is almost the opposite. Here, while getting a pedicure and a comb-out, she fondles one of her breasts and gives us a smug, seductive glance. The waiting David is faintly visible in a distant tower. The peacock of pride broods in a corner of her room.


1/9/09