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Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719)
A young artist painting a voluptuous nude model, an older friend looking over his shoulder. Signed A W Houbraken. Panel, 28.5 × 19 cm.

Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv.nr.C 153. On loan from the city of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop bequest) since 1885.

Although the viewer is assumed to think no evil when admiring a painting of a nude, artists and their models are constantly aware of the erotic element in their relationship. Arnold Houbraken wrote about the phenomenon in his life of Rembrandt, in an anecdote which he probably embellished if he did not invent it. One of Rembrandt's pupils, he wrote, painting a nude model behind a partition on a hot summer day, got so warm that he too removed his clothing. His fellow students crept up on him and listened in on the double entendre being exchanged between the two. Rembrandt joined them, peeping at the couple through a crack in the wall, and when he heard the young man say: 'We're just like Adam and Eve in Paradise, being naked together like this,' he burst in on them saying 'Because you are naked, you have to leave Paradise,' and drove them into the street without letting them get dressed. (Rembrandt would seem to have shared Adriaan van Beverland's theory of original sin; see cat.nr.74.)

In this painting, Houbraken shows a sensitivity to the joys of voyeurism. Seen through the eyes of the young painter, the model can be regarded as a studio aid; it is the appreciative gaze of the older man that turns her into a sex object. After registering that message, we notice the careless disarray of her shed garments, especially the slippers, which often serve in Dutch genre painting as an emblem of wantonness.

Exhib. cat. Maler und Modell, 1969, ad nr. 81.