Heroine from the Old Testament

By 1633 Rembrandt was still new to Amsterdam, a miller's son from Leiden barely into his late twenties, taking nearly every portrait commission the city's merchants would give him. In the middle of that busy stretch he painted this. A young woman in heavy embroidered cloth and pearls sits in a warm half-light, an old servant attending her from behind. Who she is has never been settled. For a long time people saw Rembrandt's wife Saskia in her, then Esther the Persian queen steeling herself before the king, then Bathsheba at her bath. He left out the one detail that would decide it, the way he often did. The gallery in Ottawa still lists her only as a heroine from the Old Testament.