Hendrickje Stoffels sulla porta

Rembrandt could not marry the woman leaning in this doorway, and the reason shaped both their lives. Hendrickje Stoffels had come into his house as a servant after his wife Saskia died, and the two lived together for years. Saskia's will would have cost Rembrandt his inheritance if he remarried, so they never wed, and in 1654 the Amsterdam church council summoned Hendrickje to answer for living with him unmarried. He painted her around 1656 with none of that strain showing. She rests on a half-open door in a loose housecoat, deep red warming to the light, her head tipped slightly, looking straight out at him. The pose is that of someone entirely at ease with the person holding the brush.