Against the Mirror: Indeterminacy and the Poetics of Painting in Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream

Rembrandt van Rijn’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654; The National Gallery, London) defies neat categorization. Although painted with loose, vigorous brushwork and prominently unfinished passages that suggest an informal study, the painting is signed and dated, indicating that it is a completed work. Its subject is similarly ambiguous, straddling a genre scene and a narrative representation. This article embraces these indeterminacies as purposeful and argues that Rembrandt’s play with early modern hierarchies of artistic classification extends to his experimentation with interrelated topoi central to Dutch artistic theory and practice. With this unprecedented image of a woman and her reflection, I argue, Rembrandt renders the metaphor of the mirror and mirroring as inadequate for his virtuosic art and challenges deeply gendered and poeticized tropes about artistic authority to assert his unique position within Dutch artistic culture.