A Woman in Bed

Rembrandt painted this around 1647, five years after his wife Saskia had died, when his household was kept by Geertje Dircks, who lived with him for much of that decade and is the likely model here. The woman is probably Sarah, from the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. On her wedding night she waits for her new husband Tobias, and she has reason to be tense: a demon had killed her seven previous husbands, one after another, on their wedding nights. Rembrandt gives none of that as spectacle. He shows a woman pushing back the bed curtain and leaning out into the light, caught somewhere between worry and curiosity, so close that the curtain seems to hang in our own room.