Girl in a Straw Hat

The hat is the whole picture. It is loose straw, the kind worn for work outdoors rather than for a portrait, and it throws a broken shadow down across the girl's forehead and eyes so that half her face sits in shade while she looks out of it at us. The painting is dated to about 1635, near the end of the few years that produced most of the surviving work of this hand. Roughly thirty paintings are securely given to her, and almost all of them fall between 1629 and 1636. A head like this one is a tronie, a study of a face and an expression painted for sale rather than commissioned by the sitter. No name was ever attached to her.