Category: Dutch Golden Age (c.1588–1672).

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), A Woman bathing in a Stream, 1654, Oil on oak, 61.8 × 47 cm, The National Gallery, London

The painting’s earlier provenance is not documented. It was almost certainly the lot sold at the Blackwood sale of 18-19 March 1756, where it was described as ‘A Woman going into the Water holding her Coats pretty high, and laughing at what she sees reflected.’ Before that, it was possibly the picture listed in the Andrew Hay sale of May 1739 as, simply, ‘A Woman going into a Bath.’ These early descriptions deserve attention, not because they are especially eloquent, but because of what they do not say. There is no Hendrickje. No Callisto. No mythological apparatus of any kind. The eighteenth-century cataloguer saw a woman wading into water and described what was in front of him. The identification of the model, the decoding of the subject, the biographical backstory: all of that came later, and it is worth asking what changed in the way people look at pictures between 1756 and the present day.

The painting has appeared in every major catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s work. John Smith (1781-1855) listed it as No. 165 in his A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters (1829-1842). Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929) and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930) gave it No. 353 in their complete edition (1897-1906); Hofstede de Groot subsequently catalogued it as No. 306 in his own expanded ten-volume raisonné (1907-1928). Abraham Bredius (1855-1946) assigned it No. 437 in 1935, retained by Horst Gerson (1907-1978) in the revised third edition of 1969. Kurt Bauch (1897-1975) listed it as No. 278. Christian Tümpel (1937-2009) gave it No. 122. In each case, the title remained broadly descriptive: a woman, a stream, a bath. Neil MacLaren’s (1909-1988) catalogue of the National Gallery’s Dutch School, revised and expanded by Christopher Brown in 1991, introduced a quiet but significant addition: the parenthetical question mark after Hendrickje Stoffels’s name. A Woman Bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?). That question mark is, in its way, one of the most carefully weighed interventions in the painting’s entire literature.

Then, in 2011, Ernst van de Wetering (1938-2021) published Volume V of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, the ongoing project of the Rembrandt Research Project. He gave the painting its longest and most committed title: A woman wading in a pond (Callisto in the wilderness), catalogued as V 19 and discussed across sixteen pages (pp. 519-534). Volume VI subsequently listed it as No. 229. Volker Manuth catalogued it as No. 325; Jeroen Giltaij as No. 473. What is striking about the trajectory from Smith’s plain listing in 1836 to Van de Wetering’s retitling in 2011 is the steady accretion of meaning laid onto a picture that, by its very nature, resists it. The eighteenth-century auctioneer described what he saw. Van de Wetering decided what the picture was about. Whether that represents progress in understanding or a loss of something else, a willingness to sit with uncertainty, is a question that goes well beyond this single panel.

The identification of the figure as Callisto was first proposed by Jan Leja in 1996, in an article published in Simiolus. Leja argued that the woman’s shift, pulled above her knees but emphatically not removed, aligned with the Ovidian story of Callisto as retold in seventeenth-century Dutch sources rather than in Ovid’s own Metamorphoses. Karel van Mander (1548-1606), in his commentary on the Metamorphoses appended to the Schilder-boeck [Book of Painters] (1603-1604), described how Callisto, expelled from Diana’s retinue after her pregnancy was discovered (the result of Jupiter’s assault, not her own doing), ‘for some time kept herself secretly in the wilderness.’ This detail has no counterpart in Ovid. Leja proposed that Rembrandt’s painting depicts exactly that moment: Callisto alone and exiled, wading through water, her pregnancy still concealed. Lyckle de Vries arrived independently at the same reading in 2006, and Van de Wetering adopted it for the Corpus. Bart Cornelis, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the National Gallery, has endorsed this interpretation publicly. Other scholars have proposed Susanna at her bath, though the absence of the voyeuristic elders (present in Rembrandt’s 1647 Berlin Susanna and the Elders) makes this harder to sustain. The suggestion that the figure is Diana herself, the goddess of the hunt, does not appear to have serious scholarly support: Diana is part of the Callisto story, but the identification proposed in the literature is with Callisto, not with the goddess who punishes her. Still others have drawn a connection with Bathsheba, since Rembrandt’s great Bathsheba at Her Bath (Musée du Louvre, Paris) was painted in the same year and the two women share a physical type: wide-hipped, auburn-haired, with high round foreheads. But MacLaren’s catalogue entry noted that the panel’s small size and oak support might suggest a preparatory sketch for a larger history painting, though no such painting is known, and Rembrandt, unlike Rubens, did not typically produce preliminary oil sketches for larger projects.

The biographical parallel with Hendrickje Stoffels (c. 1626-1663) is widely discussed. In July 1654, Hendrickje was summoned before the Council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam and admonished for living with Rembrandt, in the church records’ phrase, ‘like a whore’ (in hoererije), and was banned from the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Their daughter Cornelia was baptised on 30 October of that year. Hendrickje would have been about twenty-eight. The alignment with Callisto’s story is, as several scholars have acknowledged, difficult to ignore: both women punished by an institution for a pregnancy they did not choose entirely on their own terms, both exiled from a community. But how far should this kind of reading be pushed? Is the painting a private allegory, addressed to those who knew the household and would recognise the parallel? Or is the biographical reading simply the one that modern audiences find most satisfying, because it gives us a human story, and human stories, especially those involving shame and intimacy and institutional cruelty, are easier to care about than problems of iconography?

This is a question that the literature tends to raise and then quietly set aside. There is a powerful appetite, in Rembrandt studies and beyond, for the artist’s life to illuminate the artist’s work, and the appetite is strongest when the life involves suffering, scandal, or financial ruin. Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes (1999) is the most fully realised expression of this tendency, and Paul Crenshaw’s Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy (2006) traces the economic and social dimensions of the painter’s decline. But is the biographical approach the only way into a picture like this, or even the best one? The 1756 Blackwood cataloguer managed to look at the painting without knowing or caring who the woman was, and his description, which notices her holding up her clothes and laughing at her reflection, is in some respects more attentive to what is actually on the panel than much of what has been written since. He saw paint, not narrative. Whether that represents a failure of interpretation or a different, perhaps more honest, mode of looking is not a question with a settled answer.

Michael Zell, in a substantial article published in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (2024), has argued that the painting’s resistance to classification is itself the subject. Zell reads the picture as a deliberate experiment with the borders between a genre scene and a history painting, between a life study and a finished composition, and suggests that Rembrandt used the figure’s ambiguity to challenge the hierarchies of artistic categorisation that structured Dutch art theory in the writings of Van Mander and Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678). The painting is signed and dated, which confirms it was complete to Rembrandt’s satisfaction, and yet it retains the loose, energetic brushwork of an informal sketch. Zell draws a parallel with the wash drawing A Young Woman Sleeping (c. 1654, British Museum), one of Rembrandt’s few drawings executed entirely with the brush. Christian Tümpel’s (1937-2009) concept of Herauslösung, the isolation of a single figure from a recognisable biblical or classical scene, has also been applied to the painting, and Zell notes that the pose has been connected to the ancient mulier impudica, a figure-type of a woman lifting her covering to expose herself. The Rembrandt Research Project’s own characterisation is plain enough: “Although at first sight this well preserved work may appear sketchily executed, it is a very subtle painting, epitomising Rembrandt’s artistic and pictorial genius. Its authenticity has never been questioned.”

Perhaps what draws people back to this painting, year after year, has less to do with Hendrickje’s biography or Callisto’s exile than with something harder to put into words: the directness with which the paint meets the eye, the sense of a figure caught in a moment so particular and so unguarded that it feels almost intrusive to look. But then, looking is what the painting asks for. It is signed, dated, and finished. Rembrandt wanted it seen. The question is whether we see what he put there, or what we bring.

References

Bomford, D., Kirby, J., Roy, A., Rüger, A. and White, R. (2006) Rembrandt. London: National Gallery Company; New Haven: Yale University Press

Bredius, A. (1935) Rembrandt: The Complete Edition of the Paintings. Vienna: Phaidon

Bredius, A., revised by Gerson, H. (1969) Rembrandt: The Complete Edition of the Paintings. 3rd edn. London: Phaidon

Crenshaw, P. (2006) Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art Market in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hofstede de Groot, C. (1907-1928) Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century. 10 vols. London, Stuttgart and Paris

Leja, J. (1996) ‘Rembrandt’s “Woman Bathing in a Stream”‘, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 24(4), pp. 320-327.

MacLaren, N., revised and expanded by Brown, C. (1991) National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School, 1600-1900. London: National Gallery Publications

Schama, S. (1999) Rembrandt’s Eyes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Sluijter, E.J. (2006) Rembrandt and the Female Nude. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Smith, J. (1829-1842) A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters. 9 vols. London

Van de Wetering, E. (2011) ‘Rembrandt — A woman wading in a pond (Callisto in the wilderness)’, in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Vol. 5. Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 519-534

Zell, M. (2024) ‘Against the Mirror: Indeterminacy and the Poetics of Painting in Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream‘, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 16(2).Available at , https://jhna.org/articles/against-the-mirror-indeterminacy-poetics-of-painting-rembrandt-woman-bathing-in-a-stream/ (Accessed 12 2024)

RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, A Woman Bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?), 1654. RKDimages, image no. 59022. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/59022 (Accessed: 14 January 2024)

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III, 1632, Oil on panel, 29.9 x 24.9 cm, Dulwich Gallery, London

Painted in 1632, shortly after Rembrandt’s move from Leiden to Amsterdam, this portrait shows Jacob de Gheyn III, engraver and son of the court artist Jacob de Gheyn II. Although only modest in size, the panel demonstrates Rembrandt’s precision of observation: the crisp folds of the ruff, the soft modelling of flesh under light, and the controlled transition from illuminated face to shadow. Such qualities established Rembrandt as a portraitist who could fuse realism with intensity, offering a more searching image than that of his rivals.

The work is closely related to a companion portrait of Maurits Huygens, now in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg. The two men were close friends, and their commissions were brokered by Constantijn Huygens, Maurits’s brother, secretary to the Stadtholder and one of Rembrandt’s earliest and most influential patrons. Though not conceived as pendants, the portraits were bound by the friends’ pact that on the death of one, the survivor would keep both. De Gheyn’s death in 1641 fulfilled this agreement: his portrait passed to Huygens and later to his family, where the two remained together until 1786, when the pair was finally separated.

The scale and intimacy of these works reflect Rembrandt’s strategy in the early 1630s. Rather than compete directly with the established Amsterdam masters who excelled in large full-length portraits for civic patrons, Rembrandt focused on small panels that drew the eye into subtle detail and searching light. Such portraits demonstrated his ability to capture not only likeness but also the presence of the sitter within a confined space.

This approach contrasts with the monumental works he would soon undertake, beginning with the Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632, Mauritshuis) and culminating in the great civic guards’ portraits such as the Night Watch (1642, Rijksmuseum). In these, Rembrandt expanded the principles already evident here—the dramatic interplay of light, the sense of immediacy, and the psychological engagement with his sitters—onto a collective stage. The modest scale of De Gheyn’s portrait thus foreshadows the qualities that would define Rembrandt’s larger ambitions, where intimacy and monumentality were fused into new forms of civic and historical imagery.

Jacob de Gheyn pursued a career as an engraver, while the Huygens brothers became central figures in Dutch politics and culture. Their circle provided Rembrandt with access to the Stadtholder’s court and with commissions that anchored his position in Amsterdam.

Jacob de Gheyn pursued a career as an engraver, , while the Huygens brothers occupied pivotal positions in Dutch intellectual and political life. Through them Rembrandt secured access to the Stadtholder’s court and to a network of patrons whose support shaped his rise in the 1630s. The Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III thus stands at the intersection of friendship, patronage, and artistic experimentation, encapsulating the moment when Rembrandt transformed the conventions of Dutch portraiture into instruments of intimacy and distinction.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), Self-Portrait in a Heavy Fur Cap, 1631, Etching, Laid paper, Plate & Sheet 63 × 58 mm, Christie’s London, The Sam Josefowitz Collection Sale, 7 December 2023

While many of Rembrandt’s etched self-images have been classified as tronnies—studies of physiognomy, character, or expression—his self-portraits operate on a more complex level. They are at once exercises in technique, explorations of identity, and experiments in which the artist casts himself in different guises: scholar, gentleman, bohemian, soldier, or prophet. These shifting roles reflect both his private study and his public ambition, projecting an image of versatility that matched his ceaseless technical invention.

In his Leiden years, he relied on his own face as an accessible and responsive model, often practising expressions before a mirror and translating them directly to copper. The high cost of copper meant that he frequently worked several heads onto a single plate before cutting it down, which explains the minute scale of many of these early prints, including the present example.

Here, Rembrandt portrays himself as a thoughtful young man with an intent, searching gaze. The heavy fur cap partly conceals his famously untamed curls, and scholars have suggested that he first etched the hair and later added the cap—an intervention that changes not only the composition but also the social register of the figure. This layering reflects his ongoing process of self-fashioning: the self-portrait becomes not a fixed likeness, but a mutable experiment in artistic and personal identity.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669), Self-Portrait in a Cap, Wide-Eyed and Open-Mouthed, 1631, Etching and Drypoint technique, Laid paper from the Second final state, Sheet 52 x 45 mm, The Sam Josefowitz Collection Sale, 7 December 2023

This portrait of Rembrandt’s mother, Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuytbrouck (1568–1640), occupies an intriguing place in the scholarly discussion of the Rembrandt family. In the 19th century, there was a tendency to identify many of Rembrandt’s sitters as members of his family, often in a romanticising spirit, including works assumed to represent his mother. Current academic consensus, however, interprets this etching less as a literal portrait than as part of the tronie tradition, where the identity of the sitter matters less than the exploration of age, expression, and character.

Rembrandt frequently employed his mother as a model during his early years in Leiden, with around thirty works associated with this theme. Although he himself never identified these works explicitly as portraits of her, the title became attached later. The strong likelihood of her presence in them is generally accepted, based on both the repetition of her features and the respect with which she is portrayed.

It has also been argued that these depictions of the elderly woman move beyond mere study, taking on an allegorical dimension in which old age embodies virtues such as moderation, wisdom, steadfast faith, and fortitude in the face of death. In this way, the image participates in a long-standing tradition of associating the visible marks of ageing with moral exempla, offering viewers not simply an intimate likeness but a reflection on the passage of time and the human condition.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves: ‘The Three Crosses’, 1653, Drypoint on laid paper, third state (of five), Plate: 387 × 455 mm; Sheet: 396 × 465 mm, Christie’s, Old Masters Sale, London, 7 December 2023

Rembrandt’s Three Crosses stands among the most ambitious and technically daring achievements of his graphic work. Executed entirely in drypoint—a medium that produces a velvety, luminous line but quickly deteriorates under pressure—it was limited to a small number of impressions, perhaps no more than seventy-five before the plate wore down. Each surviving state records the artist’s continual rethinking of composition, meaning, and theological emphasis, making the print a rare visual document of artistic process.

Five states of the plate are known. The first two, unsigned, remain sketch-like and provisional, while the third—the present example—marks Rembrandt’s first considered completion. Around twenty-two impressions of this state are recorded. Here he concentrates light at the centre of the sheet, drawing the eye to Christ crucified, while surrounding the central event with a dense crowd in varied attitudes of alarm, pity, and indifference. The formal language of Netherlandish narrative tradition is clear: figures advance in rhythmic clusters across the picture plane, unfolding the Passion almost as a continuous sequence of episodes, comparable to Renaissance engravings by Dürer or Lucas van Leyden. The enclosing darkness at the margins works to contract the space, intensifying the viewer’s focus upon the intersection of Christ’s body and the vertical beam.

Later states profoundly alter this vision. In the fourth and fifth, produced several years afterwards, Rembrandt stripped away peripheral incident, dissolved the radiance of divine illumination, and allowed a heavy pall of shadow to engulf the scene. The emphasis shifted from a multi-scenic narrative of Calvary to an elemental meditation on Christ alone, suspended in darkness at the point of death. These revisions mark not only a technical experiment in drypoint but also a theological deepening, as the imagery moves from outward spectacle to inward reflection.

The Three Crosses gains further resonance when set beside Rembrandt’s other large-scale Passion prints of the 1650s, such as The Entombment and Christ Presented to the People (Ecce Homo). Each of these compositions, treated through successive reworkings of a single plate, unfolds as a meditation in stages: from populous, detailed evocations of the biblical drama to pared-down visions in which the mystery of redemption is conveyed through shadow, emptiness, and silence. Together, they form not a conventional Passion cycle in the medieval sense but a personal exploration of Christ’s suffering, in which the very act of re-engraving and altering becomes a metaphor for spiritual searching.

The Monogrammist IS (active 1632–1658), Portrait of an Old Lady, bust-length, wearing a fur coat and a blue and golden headdress, 1644, Oil on canvas, 38.4 × 31.8 cm, Sotheby’s, London, Old Masters Summer Sale 2023

This painting forms part of the small and distinctive group of works signed with the initials IS. The identity of the Monogrammist remains unknown, but scholars have long debated his origins, with proposals ranging from the eastern German lands to East Prussia. His oeuvre suggests an artist trained within the orbit of Dutch portraiture, possibly with direct exposure to Rembrandt or his early pupils. While no documentary evidence confirms an apprenticeship, the repeated engagement with Rembrandt’s early tronie types—elderly sitters in fur-trimmed coats and elaborate headgear—points to a painter who had studied such works closely, whether in Leiden or through their rapid dissemination on the art market.

The present portrait exemplifies that approach. The sitter, shown bust-length, gazes out with a grave expression, her lined face framed by a blue and gold embroidered headdress and the thick folds of a fur collar. The execution is precise, the brushwork restrained, and the colour range limited but effective, creating an image at once austere and richly textured. Although it takes the form of a portrait, the absence of personal attributes or inscription suggests that it is better understood as a tronie, a study of age and character.

Comparable examples by IS, including the Portrait of a Man with a Fur Collar (1632) and the Portrait of an Old Man in Schwerin, confirm a pattern of repeated types and compositional formulae. This consistency has led to speculation that the artist may have operated in a workshop context, or sought to meet market demand for Rembrandt-inspired imagery, producing works that straddled the boundary between portrait and study.

The activities of Hanseatic merchants and the lively Dutch–German art trade of the mid-seventeenth century provide a plausible context for the dissemination of such pictures. Works by Rembrandt and his circle were collected, copied, and adapted across the Baltic and German-speaking lands, their imagery often reshaped to suit regional tastes. Within this framework, the Monogrammist IS stands as a revealing figure: anonymous yet distinctive, rooted in Rembrandt’s innovations but transmitting them into new cultural settings.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Portrait of Aechje Claesdr, 1634, Oil on Baltic oak, 71.1 × 55.9 cm, The National Gallery, London

This portrait, painted when Rembrandt was only twenty-eight, depicts Aechje Claesdr, a wealthy widow from Rotterdam connected with the Remonstrant community. She had been married to Dirck Jansz van Herlaer, a prosperous merchant, who died in 1607. Thereafter she became known both for her piety and for her substantial charitable gifts, particularly to Remonstrant institutions such as the Orphanage. In 1634, the same year as this portrait, she endowed the Remonstrant Orphanage in Rotterdam with a considerable bequest, and the painting was most likely commissioned in connection with that act of benefaction.

Rembrandt’s treatment combines unflinching naturalism with a sense of moral gravity. The textures of skin, linen, and fur are rendered through dense, loaded brushwork with heavy use of lead white and earth pigments, marking a departure from the smoother surface effects of his earlier Leiden years. The face, deeply lined and attentive, conveys the burdens of age and hardship, but also dignity and steadfastness. Her attire is sober and deliberately old-fashioned, emphasising her seriousness and continuity with an earlier generation, and reflecting Remonstrant values of modesty and constancy in the face of persecution.

The Remonstrants, who opposed strict Calvinist orthodoxy after the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–1619), were heavily suppressed and often suspected of political disloyalty. Aechje’s husband and children had suffered in these conflicts, and her own fortunes were marked by the tension between prosperity and religious marginalisation. The portrait thus stands as both likeness and testimony: it records her physical presence and at the same time memorialises her courage in sustaining a dissenting community.

Although later enclosed in a heavy nineteenth-century plaster frame, which dulls its impact, the painting remains a key example of Rembrandt’s early Amsterdam portraits. It shows his ability to combine social portraiture with historical resonance, turning the image of a Rotterdam widow into a meditation on endurance, belief, and the lived experience of religious division in the Dutch Republic.