Flore

Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh in June of 1634, and around that year he painted her again and again dressed as figures from myth. Here she is Flora, the Roman goddess of spring and flowers, swathed in silk and a blue mantle with a wreath of blossoms in her hair. Among them, if you look, is a streaked tulip, the kind of rare bloom that Dutch collectors were paying small fortunes for in exactly these years. Her hand rests over her stomach and the loose folds of the dress hint at a coming child. That hope would be repeatedly broken. Of the children Saskia bore, only one lived past infancy, and she herself died at 29. Rembrandt kept returning to this guise for her, and other versions of Saskia as Flora survive in London and Dresden.