Old Woman Cutting Her Nails

When Benjamin Altman left this large canvas to the Met in 1913, it hung as a Rembrandt, and for a long time nobody doubted it. Scholars since have taken the name back. The monumental scale and the deep shadow are close to Rembrandt, so its painter almost certainly worked near him around 1655 to 1660. Some point to his Dordrecht pupils Nicolaes Maes and Abraham van Dijck, but no single attribution has held, and the museum now files it simply under the style of Rembrandt. The woman has set her sewing aside to trim her nails, an ordinary pause given the gravity of an altarpiece. In Dutch homes of the time, the needle and thread beside her and this plain act of self-care were read as the virtues of a good widow.