Saskia van Uylenburgh in Arcadian Costume

Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh in 1634, and around 1635 he painted her like this, dressed as Flora, the Roman goddess of spring. She is about 23 and they have been married a year, and he loads her with the season's flowers, tulips and roses and primulas, more of them threaded through her hair and crown. This is a young husband showing off both his wife and his own reach, made at the point when his Amsterdam career was flying. The Arcadian costume, a painter's fantasy of Renaissance dress, sets her in an idealised pastoral world. Of the four children Saskia bore him, only their son Titus survived infancy, and she herself died in 1642, at 29.