Portrait of a 62-year-old Woman, possibly Aeltje Pietersdr Uylenburgh

When Rembrandt painted this in 1632, he had just left his home town of Leiden for Amsterdam, a young man of about 25 trying to break into the busy portrait trade of a booming merchant city. He lodged with the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, and commissions came through that household. The elderly woman here is thought to be Aeltje Pietersdr Uylenburgh, a relative of the dealer and a cousin of Saskia, the woman Rembrandt would marry two years later. He gives her a plain millstone collar and a steady, unsoftened face, the skin loosening with age. For a long time nobody knew who she was. Her name was only reattached to the panel in recent decades, when the picture resurfaced at auction.