Portrait of Maria Trip

In 1639 Rembrandt was at the peak of his success as Amsterdam's fashionable portraitist, the year he bought the large house he would eventually lose. This is Maria Trip, about 20, from one of the richest families in the city. The Trips built their fortune in iron and the arms trade, supplying the weapons of Europe's wars. You can read that wealth straight off the picture. Pearls hang at her ears, her throat and her wrists, over a black silk gown edged with a triple collar of costly lace, and her hand rests on a stone balustrade beside a folded fan. Rembrandt lets soft light model her face while the fingertips just catch the balustrade's edge, half in shadow.