Saskia van Uylenburgh, the Wife of the Artist

Rembrandt seems to have started this portrait soon after he married Saskia in 1634, then set it aside and only finished it around 1640, so a single panel carries about six years of their marriage. Saskia came from money. Her father had been burgomaster of Leeuwarden, in Friesland, and the match helped launch Rembrandt in Amsterdam. Here she turns her head over her shoulder, dressed in a soft, slightly old-fashioned costume rather than the latest street fashion. The late 1630s were the couple's good years. In 1639 they bought a large house on the Breestraat, the one whose cost later helped ruin him. Of their four children only Titus lived past infancy, and Saskia died in 1642, not long after this was done, probably of tuberculosis, at 29.