Feminism And Art History by Norma Broude & Mary D. Garrard

Author:Norma Broude & Mary D. Garrard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

In her Proposition, the mood is not one of carousing but of quiet intimacy. The woman, usually depicted as a willing participant in the adventure if not its instigator, is not shown that way here. She is not entertaining the leering cavalier who offers her money; she is neither playing a lute, nor drinking, nor wearing a low-cut dress11—nor is she accepting his offer. The embodiment of domestic virtue, she continues her sewing. Rather than encouraging the man’s intentions, she becomes the embarrassed victim. The room is silent as we wait for her response. Leyster’s woman is no harlot: she is an ordinary woman being propositioned—not an extraordinary circumstance. The difference in approach is unprecedented: it surely represents, to some degree, Leyster’s viewpoint as a woman.

Leyster’s Proposition is her only treatment of this subject. She did, however, paint two other pictures of women sewing, both night scenes and both with oil lamps: one of a woman alone, which was recorded in the G. Stein Collection, Paris, 1937, and the other of a woman with her two children, in the National Gallery of Ireland. Both of these works can be dated about 1633 and share with the picture in The Hague a sympathetic attitude toward women’s domestic roles. But Leyster, in the Hague Proposition, is able to integrate the domestic and the erotic in a rare combination which still upholds the virtue of the woman.

This hypothesis becomes even more plausi ble when we compare the Proposition with a copy of Leyster’s work by an anonymous artist [5], sold from the Amédée Prouvost Collection, June 20, 1928. Along with other small changes,12 this copy includes a wineglass on the table. Presumably, the copyist “corrected” the apparent ambiguity of Leyster’s work by introducing the glass in order to explain, in the traditional way, what was really going on. The figures are put back in the roles assigned to them through the years—once again, the reason for the offer of money is understood only through seeing the woman as a temptress.

5 Anonymous, copy after Judith Leyster, Proposition (Frima Fox Hofrichter).

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