Young Girl in a Gold-Trimmed Cloak

Rembrandt painted this in 1632, the year he moved from his home town of Leiden to Amsterdam and found the city hungry for his faces. It is not a portrait of anyone in particular but a tronie, a study of a type: a young woman in a fur-trimmed cloak with a gold chain, the same model who turns up in several of his canvases from that year. People have long wanted her to be Saskia, his wife, but the two had probably not yet met. For a while doubts hung over whether Rembrandt himself painted it. Technical study of the signature, in a form he used only in 1632, helped restore it firmly to his hand, and it went back on public view a few years ago.