Hendrickje Stoffels

In the summer of 1654 Hendrickje Stoffels was called before the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam. She had been living with Rembrandt for years and was now visibly pregnant by him, and the church condemned her for it and barred her from communion. They did not marry, most likely because the will of Rembrandt's late wife, Saskia, would have cost him his inheritance if he took another wife. Their daughter Cornelia was born that autumn. This portrait dates from the same year. Hendrickje had begun as his housekeeper and become the steady centre of his troubled household, and he painted her often in these years, in a soft, warm light and a simple velvet cap, with none of the finery of a formal commission. It is an intimate picture of the woman the town had just shamed, and it now hangs in the Louvre.