Halbfigur einer Frau mit Barett

Saskia van Uylenburgh, Rembrandt's wife, died in June 1642 at 29, a few months after he handed over the militia piece now called the Night Watch. This half-length of a young woman in a beret carries the date 1643, and for a long time it was read as a portrait of Saskia painted from memory. The Berlin gallery that owns it now leans the other way and suggests the picture came out of Rembrandt's workshop that year, taking up the type of the earlier Saskia paintings without setting out to be anyone's likeness. The question is not settled, and the work stays under his name on the wall. It is a bust-length figure, 74 centimetres high, signed in the paint Rembrandt f 1643.