In most paintings of a full figure, the feet end up near the bottom edge, closest to the viewer. Painters chose to show them bare or shod, clean or dirty, copied from a statue or from the model. To their first viewers, a bare foot could signal poverty, devotion, pleasure or pain.
The twelve works below put the feet where nobody can miss them, from Rembrandt's bather and Mantegna's Saint Sebastian to Kahlo's What the Water Gave Me and Caravaggio's lost Saint Matthew.
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How I Chose These 12 Works
Each work here earns its place through its feet, in at least one of three ways. The feet carry the story instead of simply finishing a body. A witness or a written record tells what the painter did with them. Or they reveal something about the person painted: their work, their faith or their health.
Each of those meanings has its picture here. A young woman tests a stream with her toes, a peasant girl walks barefoot to the fields, and a saint leaves his overshoes behind to pray. A painter sets her own wounded foot in her bathwater, and one bare sole, turned toward a priest, may have cost Caravaggio a place above an altar.
12. Rembrandt, A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654)
A young woman wades into a dark stream and lifts her white shift, a long linen undergarment, above her knees. She looks down at the water with a small smile, and one foot moves forward slowly, testing the bed of the stream before she trusts it.
Behind her, on the bank, lies a heap of red and gold brocade, a heavy silk woven with raised patterns. It is an expensive fabric, far richer than the plain linen she has on.
Rembrandt painted her in Amsterdam in 1654, on a small oak panel that he signed and dated. The National Gallery in London has owned the picture since 1831.
He caught the moment before the step, when her weight has not yet shifted. The stream already comes almost to her knees, and below them the dark water mirrors her upside down.
Her legs are sturdy, with slightly puffed knees. Painters of the time usually gave bathing women the smooth limbs of classical statues, and Rembrandt gave this one the legs of someone used to hard physical work.
Who she was remains uncertain. She may be Hendrickje Stoffels, who came into Rembrandt's house to look after his young son after the death of his wife, Saskia, and became his partner.
If she is the model, the panel catches her in a hard year. In 1654 Hendrickje was pregnant outside marriage, and her church publicly shamed her for it and barred her from communion.
The same year Rembrandt painted a large Bathsheba, now in the Louvre. In the Bible, Bathsheba is the woman King David saw bathing from the roof of his palace and summoned to him.
Because both pictures show a woman at her bath, painted the same year, this panel could be a study for the Bathsheba. That seems unlikely. A biblical heroine would be shown nude or richly dressed, and this woman wears a plain shift of coarse cloth.
The panel was painted fast. Rembrandt barely marked the line where her shins enter the stream, so the eye cannot find the waterline, and the legs seem to run straight on into their reflection.
The shift is a mass of thick white strokes in many shades. In places Rembrandt left the warm ground uncovered, the colored layer spread over the oak before painting, and let it serve as shadow.
At a Glance
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669)
Painted: 1654, at age 47 or 48
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Where to see it: National Gallery, London
About This Painting
How big is A Woman Bathing in a Stream?
The panel measures 61.8 by 47 centimeters, about 24 by 18 1/2 inches. The wood has been identified as Baltic oak.
How did A Woman Bathing in a Stream reach the National Gallery?
Rembrandt's panel came with the bequest of the Reverend William Holwell Carr in 1831. Its inventory number is NG54.
Where does the painting hang in the National Gallery?
The National Gallery shows A Woman Bathing in a Stream in Room 22, with its other paintings by Rembrandt.
Is she the same woman as Rembrandt's Bathsheba in the Louvre?
The National Gallery notes that both women have auburn hair, a high round forehead and similar noses. The museum thinks she probably posed for Bathsheba as well, but at another time.
11. Edgar Degas, Le Pédicure (1873)
A girl lies back on a flowered sofa, wrapped from her shoulders to her ankles in a white sheet. A balding man in dark clothes bends over the one part of her body left uncovered, her bare foot, his head almost touching her toes.
Edgar Degas signed and dated the picture in the lower right corner: Degas 1873. That was the year he came home to Paris after a long stay with his mother's family, on the other side of the Atlantic.