Portrait of a Young Woman

This panel came to Milan in 1813, one of five Flemish pictures handed over in exchange for paintings Napoleon's officials had taken out of the city, and it arrived under Rembrandt's name. The date on it, 1632, is the year he moved from Leiden to Amsterdam and portrait commissions started arriving faster than one man could paint them, which is part of why the attribution is now argued over. The Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, the long scholarly survey of his work, rejected it in 1986 and gave it instead to someone close to him, working from an autograph portrait now in Boston. The technical evidence has not settled the question. The first letter of the signature looks as though it was once a P, and the veil over the shoulders appears to have been added after the painting was finished. The sitter has been called his sister Lysbeth, and also his wife Saskia.