Portrait de Baertje Martens

Rembrandt painted this in 1640, near the height of his success in Amsterdam, as one half of a pair. The other half is her husband, Herman Doomer, a cabinet-maker who worked in the fashionable black ebony and very likely made frames, perhaps even for Rembrandt himself. So this may be the portrait of a craftsman's wife done partly among neighbours in the trade. Baertje Martens sits in a plain dark dress with a stiff white ruff and cap, her face lit softly against the shadow. The two paintings stayed in the family. In her will she left them to her son, the painter Lambert Doomer, on the condition that he make copies for each of his brothers and sisters, so that nobody went without.