DRESSING AND UNDRESSING: Expressing Manhood in 17th Century Dutch Art
Martha Hollander
Associate Professor of Art History
Gabriel Metsu 1629-1667, a popular artist working in Amsterdam, created a work often titled A Hunter Getting Dressed after Bathing. In fact, it’s a naked selfportrait, the only one that we know of produced in 17th-century Holland. Male nudes appear occasionally in Dutch painting: in Biblical or mythological scenes…
Gabriel Metsu, Self-portrait as a Hunter. 1656. Oil/panel
Albrecht Dürer, in the Renaissance, had made a very private drawing of himself naked. But Metsu’s painting is public, and would have been displayed in a buyer’s home.
In a culture where explicit sexual imagery was forbidden, what did Metsu expect from his audience with this painting?
How does Metsu’s painting display his masculinity and professional status? Male nudity was associated with classical antiquity: gods and heroes. Normally, in more formal portraits and self-portraits, how could heroism be expressed for the modern, middle-class man?
While there is no documentation to explain Metsu’s bold, comic painting, we can observe that it features his discarded white shirt. Since shirts were underclothes, the frank display of linen – bleached, starched, draped and folded - became an acceptable substitute for nudity. The most versatile item in men’s wardrobes, the shirt was not only an index of character and class, (determined by cleanliness and degree of elegance) but classical authority, sexuality, and power: a stand-in for nudity.
…or as models posing for drawing classes in studio scenes.