Ritratto di dama con cagnolino

A young woman in a low-cut red dress and pearls sits against a dark, almost bottomless background, a small dog gathered in her lap. Rembrandt painted her late, around 1665, four years before he died. For a long time she was thought to be Magdalena van Loo, the wife of his son Titus, but that identification no longer holds and the sitter is simply unknown. The lap dog was a familiar signal in portraits like this, standing for faithfulness, often the loyalty of marriage. The paint is worked loosely, the light pulled toward her face and hands out of the surrounding shadow. The picture went to Toronto in 1955, left to the gallery by the collector Frank Porter Wood.