The Holy Family

Rembrandt painted this between 1633 and 1635, a few years after moving from Leiden to Amsterdam, when portrait commissions were making him busy and prosperous. He gives the Holy Family the look of an ordinary Dutch household. The scene is set in Joseph's carpenter's workshop, with tools hanging on the wall, and the figures are almost life-size. Mary holds the infant while Joseph leans over them to look at the child. The museum calls it a monumental genre painting, notes the plain, worldly naturalness it traces to Rembrandt's Dutch roots, and sees the whole picture turned toward one thing, the security of a family and the love of its parents. The canvas came to Munich in 1799 with the paintings of the Mannheim gallery.