Seated Nude Bathing by a Stove

In the present work a young naked woman is seated in a very spare interior, the most notable features of which are the expanse of greyish-brown wall and, in the left corner, a small stove. The inclusion of a nude - much less a full-length nude - in a genre scene is remarkable in the 1640s. While artists in the later 16th and early 17th centuries happily populated their classical and mythological scenes with nude women, this was not the case in representations of contemporary domestic life.