Portrait of a young woman with a pleated collar and a lace cap

In 1633 Rembrandt was still new to Amsterdam. He had come from Leiden a year or two before, and portrait commissions from the city's merchant families were arriving faster than he could keep up. This young woman is one of the faces from those busy years, dated to 1633, her name now lost. She wears a finely pleated collar and a sheer lace cap, painted with a soft, even touch. That restraint is what later got the picture into trouble. In 1986 a team of Rembrandt specialists doubted his hand and moved it toward a studio assistant. Other scholars disagreed, arguing that this quiet handling is exactly how Rembrandt painted his women in these years, and the portrait has since been given back to him in full. It carries the nickname the Middendorf Rembrandt, after a former American ambassador to the Netherlands who once owned it.