Bathsheba

Stuck's 1912 'Bathsheba' — held in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires — depicts the Old Testament scene of King David observing the beautiful Bathsheba bathing, a subject with a long European tradition from Rembrandt and Rubens to Chassériau. In the biblical narrative (II Samuel 11), David's voyeuristic desire initiates a chain of events including adultery, the arranged death of Bathsheba's husband Uriah, and divine punishment. Stuck would have been drawn to the subject's combination of a beautiful female nude and a narrative of fatal desire — the same territory as his Salome, Susanna, and various mythological temptresses. The Argentine holding reflects the active art market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that brought European academic and Symbolist painting to South American collections, particularly in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, which were rapidly developing cultural institutions to match their economic growth.

Bathsheba bathing allowed Stuck to paint a female nude in a moment of unaware exposure — the voyeuristic structure of the subject is embedded in the pictorial logic, as the viewer occupies David's privileged position.