Muchacha en un marco

Rembrandt painted this in 1641, at the height of his Amsterdam success, and played a quiet trick with it. A young woman in a dark red velvet dress and pearl earrings rests her hands on what looks like the frame of the picture, as if she is leaning out of it toward you. The painted ledge and frame are part of the canvas itself, an illusion meant to fool the eye and pull her into the room. Her clothes belong to no fashion of the 1640s. Rembrandt often dressed his sitters in this old-fashioned, storybook costume, which is partly why nobody can say who she was. For a long time some doubted it was even a genuine Rembrandt, until study in 2006 confirmed his hand. It is one of only a handful of his paintings in Poland, given to the Royal Castle in Warsaw in 1994.