Focus on this artwork and explore the Biblical account and variation.
The Second Book of Samuel (11:2-4) gives the account of King David who saw a woman bathing from his palace roof. When he asked after her, he was told that she was Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam and wife of Uriah the Hittite. David had his messengers retrieve her, and after they slept together she became pregnant with his child. David was able to marry Bathsheba by sending Uriah into battle where he was killed.Prior to Bathsheba at Her Bath, the standard treatment had been to show Bathsheba bathing out of doors—thus accounting for her visibility to David—and accompanied by maidservants. A tower could usually be seen in the distance, and perhaps a small figure of David, sometimes accompanied by his two courtiers. Such was the design Rembrandt's earlier The Toilet of Bathsheba, dated 1643. By eliminating David, his messengers and most of the traditional narrative elements from the picture—the only anecdotal references included are the letter from David (not actually mentioned in Samuel) and the presence of an attendant drying her foot—Rembrandt's presentation of Bathsheba is both intimate and monumental. As a result, the moralistic theme of previous treatments of the subject is replaced by a direct eroticism in which the viewer supplants David as voyeur.
The work is painted as life sized and in a shallow space, with Bathsheba dominating the composition as she had in no other earlier version of the scene. It is not known whether Rembrandt painted Bathsheba for his own reasons, or to satisfy a commission. Presumably in response to Rembrandt's painting, his ex-pupil and close associate Willem Drost painted Bathsheba with David's Letter the same year, which is also in the Louvre.
Second Book of Samuel Rembrandt Willem Drost David King David Bathsheba Eliam Louvre Uriah the Hittite