Portrait of a Woman

She sits at her spinning wheel, drawing the thread out with one hand and turning it with the other, her eyes lowered to the work. In 1529, when Maarten van Heemskerck painted her and her husband as a pair, a wife at the wheel was a familiar image of virtue. It goes back to the Book of Proverbs and its praise of the good wife, who lays her hands to the spindle and holds the distaff. On the companion panel her husband sits over his accounts as the prudent merchant, and she answers him as the diligent housewife. Her starched white headdress hangs in long lappets over a dark bodice. She has long been called Anna Codde of Amsterdam, a name the museum now offers only as a possibility. The inscription on the frame gives her age as 26.