Portrait of Aechje Claesdr.

The inscription beside her gives this woman's age, 83, and Rembrandt signed and dated the panel 1634. It does not give her name. For a long time she was taken for the painter's grandmother, because of a misread label on a printed copy of the picture. She has since been identified as Aechje Claesdr., widow of the Rotterdam brewer Jan Pesser. She was a leading figure among the Remonstrants, Protestants who were banned from worship in 1619, and she once had to hide one of her sons-in-law, a Remonstrant preacher, in her house. Rembrandt, then 28 and newly settled in Amsterdam, came to Rotterdam that year to paint her, her son Dirck and his wife. Her clothes follow the fashion of her youth, and the only luxury is three tiny gold pins holding her headdress.