Portrait of a Young Woman

For a long time this tiny oval was called a portrait of Dou's wife. He never married, so the name is gone and the sitter is unknown. What remains says a good deal about her. The teardrop pearls in her ears and the pearl necklace were costly and fashionable, yet she wears an open-necked blouse and a fur-trimmed jacket, the kind of thing a well-off Dutch woman wore at home. The black gauze veil over her hair was a mark of piety. Dou signed boldly on the dark background at the left, a name worth displaying. The panel is less than 15 centimetres tall, and in the neck of her chemise you can see where he changed his mind and repainted. On style and costume it is dated to about 1655.