Woman bathing her feet at a brook.

During his lifetime, Rembrandt's extraordinary skills as a printmaker were the main source of his international fame. Unlike his oil paintings, prints travelled light and were relatively cheap. For this reason, they soon became very popular with collectors not only within, but also beyond the borders of the Netherlands, and it also explains why, three centuries later, they were affordable for Wellington collector and philanthropist Sir John Ilott, who presented 37 Rembrandt prints to the National Art Gallery between 1952 and 1969.

A woman bathing her feet at a brook is puzzling when you look at it carefully, and it reveals how far Rembrandt has travelled from meticulous Dutch realism by his late career (it dates from 1658, eleven years before his death). The nude would have posed in his studio; we clearly recognise the back of her chair and the large, tassled cushion. Yet weirdly, we can also discern foliage near her head, while the foreground zone denotes the brook of the title. Rembrandt has thus imaginatively transported the nude from his studio to an outdoor setting. While viewers at the time probably thought of classical precedents like Diana, or Biblical ones like Susannah, Rembrandt deliberately withholds any obvious symbolism. There is a further paradox between who and what the viewer beholds and the nude’s apparent unawareness of our presence and gaze. This is emphasised by her face, plunged in inky shadow. It may be pushing it to claim there is a whiff of voyeurism; but this etching certainly made an impact some 200 years later on Impressionist artist Edgar Degas and his brilliant but disturbing studies of women at their toilette. An artist’s artist then is Rembrandt – and a very modern one too.