座る女性の肖像

In 1632 Rembrandt had just moved from Leiden to Amsterdam, and portrait commissions were how he made that move pay. He was 26, working through a queue of merchants and their wives who wanted black silk, white linen and a good likeness. This woman has never been identified. She sits with her hands on the arms of the chair, and it is the hands that specialists keep coming back to.

The picture has a companion piece in Kassel, painted as its pendant and separated from it for generations. The two were shown side by side again this year, in a Kassel exhibition built entirely around Rembrandt's year 1632.

Whether he painted all of it is disputed. The Rembrandt Research Project found the pose too stiff and passive for his hand and suggested Ferdinand Bol, who only entered the studio three years later. Vienna's Academy still catalogues it under Rembrandt.