Willem Drost (1633–1659), Young Woman in a Brocade Gown, c.1654, Oil on canvas, 62.4 × 49.8 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
Willem Drost remains one of the most intriguing figures of the Rembrandt circle, his brief life and small oeuvre clouded by misattribution and uncertainty. Born in Amsterdam in 1633, he entered Rembrandt’s studio as a teenager and absorbed the master’s dramatic use of light and shade, as well as his interest in exotic costume and historical imagination. Drost’s career, however, was cut short when he died in Venice at only twenty-five, just as his independent style was beginning to emerge. His work was long mistaken for that of Rembrandt, and several of his finest paintings entered collections under the older master’s name. Only with modern scholarship has his distinct contribution been disentangled from Rembrandt’s legacy.
The Young Woman in a Brocade Gown is a compelling example of this confusion. Attributed to Rembrandt until the nineteenth century, and even signed with his name by a later hand, it was purchased as such by the dealer Chrétien-Jean Nieuwenhuys before entering the collection of Sir Richard Wallace. The false signature was not removed until the 1970s, when Drost’s authorship was firmly established.
The painting depicts a bust-length figure in rich orientalising costume, with a heavy brocaded gown and a turban wound across her head. Such fantasies of ‘eastern’ attire, drawing on Italian precedents and contemporary interest in the Levant, were already common among Dutch and Flemish painters in the 1650s. They provided a ready vehicle for the depiction of female beauty outside the conventions of strict portraiture, blurring the lines between history painting, allegory, and genre. Rembrandt himself, along with his pupils and followers, produced many such half-length images of women in exotic dress, sometimes presented as mythological heroines or courtesans, sometimes left deliberately ambiguous.
Drost’s version is distinguished by the sensuous handling of textiles, the precise description of embroidered surfaces, and the soft modelling of flesh. It is not a portrait in the conventional sense but rather an imaginative evocation, a type designed for the open art market where collectors prized beauty and exoticism as much as narrative or moral content. In this respect it reflects both the taste of mid-seventeenth-century Amsterdam and the painter’s skill at adapting Rembrandt’s idiom to the demands of private collectors.