A Slaughtered Ox

A Slaughtered Ox of 1655 in the Louvre is among the most unsettling and original paintings Rembrandt produced, transforming a commonplace sight in Amsterdam's butcher district into a painting of raw, unsettling power. The large carcass hanging in a dark doorway — split open, ribs exposed, the deep reds of the interior contrasting with the pale fat at the surface — was a subject without precedent in serious Dutch painting, though it connects to the still-life tradition of market and kitchen pieces. Rembrandt's treatment refuses the aesthetic distancing that kitchen-piece painters typically employed; the carcass is presented with confrontational directness, its proximity to death undisguised by arrangement or by the mitigating presence of fruit, fish, or serving-women. The painting's influence on subsequent Western art has been enormous: Delacroix copied it and spoke of it with reverence, Chaim Soutine's whole series of flayed carcasses painted in Paris in the 1920s is unimaginable without it, and Francis Bacon returned to its imagery in his paintings of human flesh. The Louvre holds the panel as one of the most frequently discussed objects in its Dutch collection.

Rembrandt renders the carcass with thick, almost sculptural impasto in reds, yellows, and whites that create an extraordinary sense of physical presence. The broad, confident brushwork transforms raw flesh into a composition of startling beauty and material power.