A Girl as Flora

Around 1640 in Amsterdam there was a fashion for having a young woman painted as Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and spring, crowned and holding blossoms. Rembrandt had done it with his own wife a few years earlier. Govert Flinck knew the theme from the inside: he had trained in Rembrandt's studio and was counted among his best pupils. By the time he painted this, he was easing out of the master's shadow, trading Rembrandt's deep shadow and rough surface for something smoother and more elegant, the polished manner that would soon make him one of the city's fashionable portraitists. The flowers and the soft landscape behind her belong to that lighter touch. It hangs today in the fine-arts museum of Nantes.