Susanna Bathing

Unknown artist after Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)

18th c. Oil on wood

Johannes Mikkel considered Peter Paul Rubens to be the author of this nude, which he thought depicted the artist’s young wife Helene Fourment. However, the painting was not executed by Rubens himself, but was made after Lucas Vorstermann’s engraving (1620) of Rubens’s painting “Susanna and the Elders”, which has gone missing. The unknown artist who painted the version in the Mikkel Museum approached his model rather freely: he copied only the nude figure and the fountain, but left out the elders, which referred to the moralising biblical story. The National Museum in Warsaw owns an exact duplicate of the painting: the composition of the two paintings are identical, they are of the same size, and both are painted on wood. There is good reason to believe that both paintings were made by the same studio in the first half of the 18th century, but it is difficult to say where the studio was located: in present-day Belgium or in the German-Polish territories. In his lifetime, Rubens was mainly known for his monumental altar paintings, but 18th-century art lovers appreciated more his slightly erotic art, particularly his skilful and sensual depictions of the female body.