Portrait of a Seated Woman with Her Hands Clasped

Rembrandt signed and dated this in 1660, and nobody has ever worked out who the old woman is. There is no coat of arms and no companion portrait of a husband, and the reading now is that he painted her as a study of a head rather than to order. The face is worked wet into wet, ochre and pink and white dragged through one another while the paint was still soft, so the slack skin comes out of the handling itself. Sir Abraham Hume, an English collector, owned it by 1818, and his catalogue of 1824 is the first to call it a Rembrandt. Not everyone since has agreed. The name of his pupil Johannes Raven has been put forward, and the collection that holds it answers with the technical evidence. It has gone out on loan to Beijing, Moscow, St Petersburg and Abu Dhabi.