Portrait de Haesje Jacobsdr van Cleyburg

In 1634 Rembrandt was 28, newly married and taking on more portrait commissions than in any other year of his life. This one took him out of Amsterdam to Rotterdam, to a brewer called Dirck Pesser and his wife, Haesje van Cleyburg, who was then about 51.

They belonged to Rotterdam's Remonstrant families, the liberal Protestant minority that had been driven out of its pulpits after the church settlement of 1619 and was only quietly tolerated again by the 1630s. Their plain black says something of that. It was also expensive. The millstone ruff at her throat used something like 15 metres of linen.

Rembrandt left her the grey hair, the heavy lids and the shadows under her eyes as they were. The portrait of her husband, painted to hang beside hers, is now in Los Angeles.