Portrait of a Woman holding Gloves

She is one half of a married pair. Her husband's portrait hangs beside her, painted around 1632 on the same kind of walnut panel, with the same materials and the same technique, his gesture turned toward her and hers answering it. The pair of gloves in her hand belongs to that marriage language. Gloves were a customary wedding gift in the Netherlands, and they turn up again and again in the hands of wives in Dutch pendant portraits of these years. Amsterdam's merchant families were ordering such matching pairs in numbers, and Rembrandt's studio was one of the busiest places to get them. That busy studio is also where the doubts about her begin. The museum lists this panel as Rembrandt and workshop, and the scholars of the Rembrandt Research Project judged her stiff, passive pose not to be his own work. Neither sitter's name has come down to us, and the two portraits are recorded in the imperial gallery in Vienna by 1783.