The Proposition (painting)
| The Proposition | |
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| Artist | Judith Leyster |
| Year | 1631 |
| Medium | Oil on panel |
| Dimensions | (11 3/8 in × 9.5 in) |
| Location | Royal Picture Gallery, Mauritshuis, The Hague |
The Proposition is a genre painting of 1631 by Judith Leyster, now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, who title it Man offering money to a young woman. It depicts a woman, sewing by candlelight, as a man leans over her, touching her right shoulder with his left hand. He is offering her coins in her right hand, but she is apparently ignoring the offer and concentrating intently upon her sewing.
The man wears dark clothing, and the dark tones as well as his shadow cast behind him and across his face from the angle of the candlelight give him a looming appearance. In contrast, the woman is lit fully in the face by the candlelight, and wears a white blouse. It is an early work by Leyster, who was only 22 years old in 1631.
Meg Lota Brown, professor of English at the University of Arizona, and Kari Boyd McBride, professor of Women's Studies at the same, consider The Proposition to be "one of [Leyster's] most intriguing works from her period of greatest artistic output". Marianne Berardi, an art historian specializing in Dutch Golden Age painting, states that it is "perhaps her most notable painting". Its most distinctive feature is how different it is to other contemporary Dutch and Fleming "sexual proposition" paintings, many falling into the Merry company genre. The convention for the genre, a common one at the time, was for the characters to be bawdy, and clearly both interested in sex, for money. The dress would be provocative, the facial expressions suggestive, and sometimes there would be a third figure of an older woman acting as a procuress. Indeed, in The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen, an example of the genre, that is exactly the case.
In contrast, in The Proposition the woman is depicted not as a whore but as an ordinary housewife, engaged in a simple everyday domestic chore. She isn't dressed provocatively. She does not display her bosom (but rather her blouse covers her all of the way to her neck). No ankles are visible. And she displays no interest in sex or even in the man at all. Contemporary Dutch literature stated the sort of activity in which she is engaged to be the proper behaviour for virtuous women in idle moments. Kirstin Olsen observed that male art critics "so completely missed the point" that the woman is, in contrast to other works, not welcoming the man's proposition that they mistakenly named the painting The Tempting Offer.
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