Portrait of a Woman

The Metropolitan's line for this canvas names no painter. It reads Style of Rembrandt, Dutch, mid- to late 1640s, which is the museum's way of saying the picture was made in Amsterdam, close to Rembrandt, by a hand it will not put a name to. The caution is earned. Rembrandt had been running a crowded teaching studio for years by then, and a good number of painters could manage his warm browns and reds and his way of letting a face come forward out of a dark room. Canvases in that manner have moved in and out of his catalogue ever since.

The sitter has no name either. She was painted as one of a pair, and the companion canvas, the same size, shows a man in a breastplate and a plumed hat. Both came to the museum in 1929 with the bequest of Louisine Havemeyer, whose New York collection was one of the largest to cross into an American museum. She holds a folded fan in one hand and rests it on the back of a chair.