Woman Bathing (van Eyck)

[4] The attribution of either panel to an original by van Eyck is usually not contested; while it may be doubted whether either copy was completed until one or two generations after his early death c. 1441, it is accepted that neither is a forgery or wishful thinking.

[6] In the tradition of such scenes, the mirror symbolises virtue and purity, while the dog in the lower center at the woman's feet – barely visible in the Fogg panel due to loss of paint, but more distinguishable in van der Geest's work – represents her fidelity.

Facio's description includes details of a dog, a burning lamp similar to the one in the Arnolfini Portrait,[9] and a distant landscape visible through an open window.

[11] Both the Fogg and London panels show an interior containing a bed and a small dog (probably an early form of the breed now known as the Brussels griffon), a mirror and its reflection, a chest of drawers and clogs on the floor, while the angle the attendant woman faces from, and her dress and the outline of her figure, are broadly similar.

The London panel, she observes, may have been "painted for the wall of Giovanna Cenami's father's house where she would have seen it in the years between her betrothal and her marriage ... perhaps ... the erotic half may have been given to her future husband as a guarantee of what he was promised".

[1] Seidel believes that the pattens at the lower left hand corner of the panel, as well as the fact that the mirror is angled towards the viewer's point of view, reinforce the idea that a future husband was the intended audience.

She notes the work's unusually steep perspective, and concludes that the "panel's controlling gaze align[ed] it with the mirror's reflection of the woman's naked body".