Retrato de una mujer con abanico de plumas de avestruz

Rembrandt painted this woman around 1656, the same year he had to hand his creditors a full inventory of his possessions in Amsterdam. She was made as one half of a pair. Her husband hangs in a matching portrait, lit from exactly the same side. She tilts her ostrich fan toward him, he gestures toward her, and the two have looked across that gap ever since. Who they were, no one has worked out. By 1803 the pair hung in the Yusupov palace in Saint Petersburg, and sometime before 1919 they were smuggled out of the Moika Palace as the Russian Revolution closed in. The herringbone-weave canvas underneath is a support Rembrandt is not known to have used before.