Portrait of Maertgen van Bilderbeecq, Wife of Willem Burggraeff

Rembrandt had been in Amsterdam about two years when this commission came in 1633, and the couple who ordered it were from his home town. Willem Burchgraeff was a baker and grain merchant in Leiden, and Rembrandt's father had been a miller there, in the same guild, so these were people from the trade he grew up around. The two had married in 1625 and were painted as a pair, she in an oval with a ruff and a lace cap, he on a matching panel that is now in Dresden, so the marriage hangs in two cities. The lace is the disputed part. The Rembrandt Research Project raised doubts in 1986 about who painted the cap, the portrait was left out of the corpus in 2015, and Frankfurt still gives it to Rembrandt, with recent X-ray fluorescence scanning of the paint layers reopening the question.