Portrait of a Seated Woman with a Handkerchief

This portrait carries Rembrandt's signature and the date 1644, and for a long time that settled the matter. Modern scholars are no longer sure. Many now give it to Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt's most gifted pupil, who was working in the master's Amsterdam studio around then and learning to imitate his hand. The face and fingers are built up in a way that looks a little unlike Rembrandt himself. Fabritius did not have long. In 1654 he was in Delft when the town's gunpowder store blew up, destroying his studio and killing him at 32, along with most of his paintings. This canvas, made a decade earlier and left behind in Amsterdam, is one reason we still know his work at all.