Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Vertumnus and Pomona, 1615. Oil on canvas, 90.4 × 104 cm. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Vertumnus and Pomona, 1615. Oil on canvas, 90.4 × 104 cm. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Hendrick Goltzius was among the most celebrated Dutch printmakers of the late sixteenth century. His engravings, produced with extraordinary technical finesse, were avidly collected across Europe and provided a model for artists from Haarlem to Rome. Large workshops assembled portfolios of such prints as repositories of motifs and inventions, and Goltzius’s work circulated more widely than many of his painted contemporaries. Trained initially within Haarlem Mannerism, he developed the distinctive exaggerated musculature and restless poses that defined the style. A journey to Italy in 1590–91, however, transformed his outlook. Encounters with antiquity and with the work of Raphael and Michelangelo prompted him to abandon Mannerist distortion for a new classicism. Around 1600 he shifted from engraving to painting, convinced that the higher status of the medium would allow him to claim a more elevated place within the artistic hierarchy.
Vertumnus and Pomona is among his mature mythologies, conceived with the precision of a draughtsman but animated by painterly depth and colour. The subject derives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a key textual reservoir for Renaissance and Baroque artists. Pomona, the nymph of orchards, devoted herself to tending fruit but shunned male company. Vertumnus, the god of seasonal change, pursued her relentlessly, assuming successive disguises—ploughman, vinedresser, reaper—each embodying a stage of nature’s cycle. She resisted until he finally appeared as an old woman, gained her trust, told a tale of love’s rewards, and then revealed his true youthful form.
Goltzius captured this moment of persuasion with a balance of sensuality and allegory. Pomona is shown with the fruits of her garden, emblems of fecundity and also of transience, while Vertumnus, vigorous yet cloaked in disguise, embodies both desire and transformation. The theme of youth yielding to age—and of constancy beneath mutable appearances—resonated with Goltzius’s own artistic trajectory, from Mannerist virtuosity to classical restraint.
A closely related version, painted in 1613 and now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, reveals the artist’s sustained interest in the subject during his final years. Together these canvases testify to his ability to translate the incisive line of the engraver into the layered textures of oil, and to his ambition to elevate Dutch painting through the learned treatment of classical myth.
Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), ‘A Young Man in a Fur Cap and a Cuirass (probably a Self-Portrait),’ 1654. Oil on canvas, 70.5 × 61.5 cm. The National Gallery, London
Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), ‘A Young Man in a Fur Cap and a Cuirass (probably a Self-Portrait),’ 1654. Oil on canvas, 70.5 × 61.5 cm. The National Gallery, London
Carel Fabritius’s life and career were cut short in the Delft gunpowder explosion of 12 October 1654, when a munitions store detonated, destroying a quarter of the city. He was killed in his early thirties along with his workshop and much of his work. Fewer than fifteen paintings are now attributed to him, yet they show a painter of exceptional invention who stood apart from his teacher Rembrandt.
This portrait, painted in his final year, is widely accepted as a self-image. Fabritius presents himself in a fur cap and cuirass, adopting the conventions of Renaissance portraiture rather than recording his everyday appearance. The martial costume asserts presence and gravity, and situates the painter within a tradition of intellectual self-fashioning rather than military reality.
The same features appear in two earlier likenesses, one in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and one in Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum, both painted in the mid-1640s when Fabritius was working in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam studio. Those pictures reveal his early adherence to the deep shadows and massing of form characteristic of Rembrandt. After leaving Amsterdam following the death of his first wife in 1643, Fabritius settled in Delft in 1650. There he developed a markedly different style, favouring clarity of light, atmospheric recession, and subtle shifts of paint handling—qualities that distinguished him from Rembrandt and influenced Delft painters such as Johannes Vermeer.
The Young Man in a Fur Cap and a Cuirass belongs to that final Delft period. Its theatrical costume, clear illumination, and carefully judged surface effects embody Fabritius’s independence from the Rembrandt school and his ambition to position himself within a broader European pictorial tradition. It is also one of the few works to survive the disaster that ended his life, giving it an added historical weight as a rare witness to the career of a painter who might otherwise have altered the course of Dutch art more profoundly.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) or/with his Studio, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, c.1650–1660, Oil on canvas, 101.9 × 83.7 cm, The National Gallery, London
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) or with/his studio, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, c.1650–1660. Oil on canvas, 101.9 × 83.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
In the summer of 1654, Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1626–1663) was summoned three times before the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam. She had been living with Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn outside marriage, and she was pregnant. The council admonished her for having, in its recorded phrase, committed the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter. She was barred from the Lord’s Supper. Their daughter Cornelia was baptised on 30 October that year. Hendrickje never married Rembrandt, almost certainly because the terms of his first wife Saskia van Uylenburgh’s (1612–1642) will would have cost him the income from her estate: the arrangement was financially rational, socially devastating, and it placed Hendrickje permanently outside the bounds of respectability in Reformed Amsterdam.
It is against this domestic reality that a small group of half-length female figures emerged from Rembrandt’s studio during the 1650s, paintings that resist every comfortable classification. They are not conventional portraits. The women wear elaborate costumes that belong to no particular time or place, draped in furs, pearls, and wraps that evoke biblical or classical heroines without committing to any single narrative. The term most commonly applied to them is tronie, a character study or type rather than a portrait, though even that label sits uneasily with canvases that carry such evident individuality in the faces. As Dagmar Hirschfelder has demonstrated, the boundary between tronie and portrait was already a persistent problem in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and it has only become harder to draw in retrospect. A tronie, in Hirschfelder’s working definition, is a head or half-figure dressed in fantasy costume, painted after life but without the commemorative or representational function of a portrait. The difficulty is that Rembrandt’s half-length women often look as though they are commemorating someone very particular indeed.
This painting, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, belongs to that group. Comparable examples survive in the Musée du Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among them, only the Juno (c.1662–1665, oil on canvas, 127 × 123.8 cm, The Armand Hammer Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles) can be tied to a specific documentary context. In the summer of 1665, the Amsterdam moneylender and collector Harmen Becker (c.1617–1678) came to press Rembrandt for an outstanding debt of 537 guilders. Becker spotted the half-finished canvas in the studio and agreed to reduce the debt if the painting were completed and handed over. The rest of the group floats without documentary anchorage, their purposes and original destinations unknown.
The pictorial formula has a genealogy that extends well beyond Rembrandt’s household difficulties, and the sources feeding into it were not singular. Half-length images of women in rich dress, poised between portraiture and idealised type, had been a European preoccupation for more than a century by the time these canvases were produced. The Venetian belle donne form the most conspicuous precedent, and the one for which direct evidence of Rembrandt’s engagement is strongest. Palma Vecchio (c.1480–1528), born Jacopo Negretti in Serina Alta near Bergamo, produced dozens of fair-haired, heavy-lidded women in loose chemises whose identities are left deliberately open. His A Blonde Woman (c.1520, oil on poplar?, 77.5 × 64.1 cm, The National Gallery, London) exemplifies the type: a voluptuous figure holding spring flowers, her chemise slipping from one shoulder, her gaze sidelong, at once reticent and inviting. Are these women saints? Courtesans? Brides on the morning of their wedding? The question was part of the transaction. ‘Flora”‘was both a goddess and a common name for courtesans in sixteenth-century Venice, and the slippage between the two meanings was productive rather than accidental. Titian (c.1488/90–1576) refined the formula further. His Flora (c.1515, oil on canvas, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) inhabits exactly this territory: a young woman holding flowers, dressed in a slipping chemise, who might be goddess, bride, or simply a beautiful figure offered for the viewer’s contemplation. Rona Goffen has argued that Venetian painters exploited this categorical ambiguity as a deliberate strategy, allowing the same image to function simultaneously as devotional object, erotic invitation, and demonstration of painterly mastery.
That Rembrandt knew this tradition is not a matter of conjecture. The Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, holds a Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1656–1657) whose pictorial type directly recalls Palma Vecchio’s courtesan portraits, and scientific investigation has shown that the position of the right arm originally corresponded with the Venetian model before Rembrandt progressively modified it. The Amsterdam art market of the seventeenth century was well supplied with Italian paintings, prints, and copies, and Rembrandt was an avid collector. His 1656 insolvency inventory lists Italian works and albums of prints in considerable number. The connection was not passive reception but active reworking: Rembrandt absorbed a formula designed for pleasure and turned it toward something less accommodating.
But the Venetian belle donne were far from the only current flowing into these paintings. The half-length female figure in fantasy dress had been circulating across Northern Europe for generations. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) produced serial images of Venus, Lucretia, and other classical heroines as half-length or three-quarter-length figures, nude or semi-nude, wearing nothing but elaborate hats and jewellery, their bodies rendered according to a distinctive slender Gothic ideal that stood at a considerable remove from Venetian opulence. These were commercially successful workshop products, turned out in substantial numbers from Cranach’s Wittenberg studio, and they established a Northern market appetite for the erotically charged female half-figure that predated Rembrandt by more than a century. Closer to home, the Utrecht Caravaggists of the 1610s and 1620s, particularly Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) and Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629), had brought back from Rome a taste for half-length figural compositions drawn from Caravaggio and his follower Bartolomeo Manfredi (c.1582–1622): musicians, drinkers, fortune-tellers, and courtesans, strongly lit and dramatically cropped. Their half-length women were genre types rather than idealised beauties, and Hirschfelder has noted that the Utrecht masters characterised their figures through exaggerated and manipulated stereotypes rather than working naer het leeven (from life). They nonetheless contributed to the visual environment in which the Dutch tronie took shape. Behind all of these lay the influence of Northern print culture: Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), whose graphic works Rembrandt knew well, had produced fantasy heads and costumed figures that Hirschfelder and Franziska Gottwald have both identified as important precursors, the elaborate costumes in many later tronies amounting to a nostalgic reworking of Renaissance-era dress encountered through earlier engravings.
What Rembrandt did with all of this material was not aggregation but transformation. The Venetian belle donne left their women unnamed because anonymity widened the image’s range of possible uses and, by extension, its commercial appeal. Rembrandt’s studio left these women unnamed too, but the effect is different. In Venice the absence of a name invites projection and fantasy. In Amsterdam, in these canvases from the 1650s, it feels more like withholding. The viewer senses that someone specific is present but is not being introduced.
This raises the question of whether these women were painted from life, and if so, at what social cost. In sixteenth-century Venice, the use of courtesans, mistresses, and professional models for such paintings operated within a cultural framework that, while not uncontested, was broadly tolerated by patrons and public alike. The Venetian belle donne were understood to exist in a space where portraiture, allegory, and erotic display overlapped, and neither painters nor sitters appear to have suffered significant consequences for participating in it. Reformed Amsterdam in the 1650s was a different matter. The church council that censured Hendrickje in 1654 was not an abstract body enforcing distant rules; it was a local institution with the power to exclude individuals from communion and, by extension, from the social fabric of the community. For a woman already living under that censure to sit as a model for paintings that circulated publicly, paintings whose luxurious costume and ambiguous identity evoked the very traditions of courtesan portraiture from which they partly derived, would have carried a charge that no Venetian bella donna needed to bear. Svetlana Alpers, in her study of Rembrandt’s studio practice, has drawn attention to the theatrical dimension of his use of models, the way in which the studio functioned as a controlled environment where real individuals were transformed into pictorial types. But the transformation was never complete. However much the costume and pose might generalise the figure into a tronie, the face remained stubbornly particular.
Whether Hendrickje sat for this particular canvas is a question that scholarship has circled without settling. The identification rests on resemblance to other paintings where she is more confidently proposed as the model, particularly the Bathsheba at her Bath (1654, Musée du Louvre, Paris), the Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654, The National Gallery, London), and the so-called Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1654–1656, The National Gallery, London), where the sitter wears pearl earrings, a gold chain, and an almost regal bearing. The Metropolitan Museum’s Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1654–1656), perhaps intended as a generic image of a courtesan according to that institution’s own catalogue entry, complicates the picture further: if even a painting that looks like Hendrickje was conceived as a type, what does that tell us about the rest of the group? Marieke de Winkel has shown how extensively Rembrandt’s studio recycled costumes and accessories, and it is worth asking whether the continuity scholars detect between these faces reflects a single sitter or a well-practised studio habit of producing a recognisable type. The desire to name Hendrickje in these paintings may say as much about the modern viewer’s appetite for biographical narrative as it does about what was actually happening on the Breestraat.
The attribution of the painting itself remains contested, and the unevenness of the handling is the principal reason. The head is modelled with a sensitivity and directness characteristic of Rembrandt’s own probing brushwork, while passages elsewhere (particularly in the drapery) are more mechanical, suggesting the participation of studio assistants. This division of labour was standard practice in the 1650s. Pupils and assistants produced works that the master might correct, retouch, or leave partly unresolved, and the resulting canvases occupy an uncomfortable zone between autograph and workshop production.
The dating of this group is further complicated by the crisis of 1656. In July of that year, Rembrandt applied for cessio bonorum, a form of insolvency under the Amsterdam Civil Ordinance of 1643 that allowed a debtor to surrender his goods to the municipal authorities for sale in order to satisfy creditors. The contents of his house and studio on the Breestraat were inventoried and subsequently dispersed at public auction; Rembrandt, Hendrickje, and his son Titus (1641–1668) moved across the city to more modest quarters on the Rozengracht. To circumvent the requirement that future earnings be paid to creditors, Hendrickje and Titus formed a commercial partnership in which Rembrandt was nominally their employee, receiving only enough to cover his basic necessities. Whether this painting predates or follows that collapse remains an open question. The inventory, drawn up by the city’s commissioners, offers a snapshot of what remained, but it cannot account for what had already left the studio through sale, gift, or other means.
What remains, stripped of the questions that encircle it, is a painting that holds something back. The woman’s expression is composed but not blank, her costume rich but not showy, her pose dignified but carrying none of the performative warmth that marks the Venetian prototypes or the dramatic cropping of the Utrecht Caravaggists. If Palma Vecchio and Titian presented their half-length women as objects of aesthetic pleasure, images that asked to be enjoyed, and if Cranach turned the female body into a vehicle for sly eroticism dressed up as classical learning, Rembrandt (or whoever completed this canvas) seems less concerned with offering anything at all. The painting asks to be looked at, certainly. But it does not flatter the act of looking, and it does not explain itself. Whether that reticence belongs to the painter, to the sitter, or to the particular conditions under which a woman in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam might find herself painted but not named, is a question the canvas declines to answer.
References
Alpers, S. (1988) Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bruyn, J. et al. (eds.) (1982–1989) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vols. I–III. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project
De Winkel, M. (2004) Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Goffen, R. (1997) Titian’s Women. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Gottwald, F. (2011) Das Tronie: Muster, Studie, Meisterwerk. Die Genese einer Gattung der Malerei vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zu Rembrandt [The Tronie: Pattern, Study, Masterwork. The Genesis of a Genre of Painting from the Fifteenth Century to Rembrandt]. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag
Gould, C. (1987) National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools. London: National Gallery Publications
Hirschfelder, D. (2008) Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts [Tronie and Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Painting]. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag
Maclaren, N. and Brown, C. (1991) National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School, 1600–1900. 2nd edn. 2 vols. London: National Gallery Publications
Postma, H.J. (1988) ‘De Amsterdamse verzamelaar Herman Backer (c.1617–1678): Nieuwe gegevens over een geldschieter van Rembrandt’ [‘The Amsterdam Collector Herman Backer (c.1617–1678): New Data on a Moneylender to Rembrandt’], Oud-Holland, 102, pp. 1–21.Available at, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42717486 (Accessed 23 July 2023)
Rylands, P. (1992) Palma Vecchio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Van de Wetering, E. (1997) Rembrandt: The Painter at Work. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Van de Wetering, E. (ed.) (2005) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. IV: Self-Portraits. Dordrecht: Springer
Van de Wetering, E. (ed.) (2014) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt or circle of Rembrandt, Half figure of a woman with a white wrap, 1654-1656. RKDimages, image no. 41279. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/41279 (Accessed: 12 July 2023)
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Self Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640. Oil on canvas, 91 × 75 cm. The National Gallery, London
In seventeenth-century Amsterdam the art market was awash with antiquities, engravings, Renaissance paintings, and exotic curiosities. Ships brought treasures from Venice, Antwerp, and beyond, and collections changed hands at auction with remarkable frequency. For a painter such as Rembrandt, who in the late 1630s had secured a position among the city’s leading masters, there was no need to travel to Italy: the legacy of the Renaissance was on his doorstep. He was an eager participant in this market, building his own collection of paintings, prints, and unusual objects, and closely following the arrival of great works in Amsterdam. The dispersal of Lucas van Uffelen’s collection in 1639, which included masterpieces by Raphael and Titian, offered him the opportunity to study such models directly and to absorb their authority into his own art.
The Self Portrait at the Age of 34, painted the following year, is the most deliberate statement of this engagement. Dressed in sixteenth-century costume, with heavy folds of rich fabric and the glint of gold thread, Rembrandt casts himself in the lineage of Venetian and Roman portraiture. His pose echoes Raphael’s Baldassare Castiglione and Titian’s Gerolamo Barbarigo, both recently in Amsterdam and widely admired. The costume is not a theatrical whim but part of a cultivated language of self-fashioning, drawing upon the prestige of earlier generations and their association with poetry, diplomacy, and intellectual authority.
Yet while the structure is borrowed, the character is his own. Rembrandt’s gaze is unflinching, his modelling of flesh and fabric executed with a solidity and depth absent from his Italian models. The portrait is at once homage and assertion, a way of situating himself not only as the heir to Renaissance traditions but as their living continuation in the Dutch Republic.
The work was painted during a period of professional success and personal tragedy. By 1640 he had lost three of his children with Saskia van Uylenburgh, his wealthy Frisian wife. Their only surviving son, Titus, would be born the next year, but Saskia herself would die in 1642, leaving Rembrandt a widower at the age of thirty-six. In retrospect the faint melancholy discernible in this portrait seems prophetic, an undertone beneath the confident pose.
At the time, however, Rembrandt stood at the height of his career, living in a grand house, surrounded by art and rare objects, engaged in a vibrant market where the legacies of the past were constantly renewed. This painting crystallises that moment: a Dutch artist consciously fashioning himself through the splendour of Renaissance portraiture, yet speaking with a voice entirely his own.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Titus, the Artist’s Son, 1657. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 57.3 cm. The Wallace Collection, London
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Titus, the Artist’s Son, 1657. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 57.3 cm. The Wallace Collection, London
In November 1655, a fourteen-year-old boy in Amsterdam sat down to make a will. The boy was Titus van Rijn (1641–1668), and the will named his father, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), as sole heir, a legal manoeuvre designed to shield what remained of the family’s assets from the painter’s creditors (Crenshaw, 2006, pp. 68–69). It was an act that no child should have needed to perform. What kind of adolescence produces a testamentary document before a first commission, a first love, or a first independent thought? Titus was not yet fifteen. Within months, in July 1656, Rembrandt would apply for cessio bonorum, the formal surrender of goods to the municipal authorities, and the household on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat would begin its slow dismantlement. It is somewhere in the wake of that collapse, around 1657, that Rembrandt painted this portrait.
The painting belongs to a concentrated period in which Rembrandt, stripped of legal competence over his own affairs, could no longer sell his own work. By 1660, Titus and Rembrandt’s companion Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1626–1663) would establish a formal company dealing in paintings, prints and curiosities, hiring Rembrandt as their employee. The arrangement was a legal fiction, but an effective one: it allowed the painter to continue working while his earnings were insulated from further claims. At the time this portrait was made, then, Titus was already something more than a sitter. He was the person on whom the practical survival of the household depended, a teenager carrying obligations that would have been heavy for a grown man.
Rembrandt dresses him in a sixteenth-century Venetian costume, complete with a gold chain and a soft red beret from which loose curls spill forward. The costume was drawn from the painter’s own collection of studio props, which the 1656 inventory had meticulously catalogued before it was all sold off. There is something pointed, perhaps even defiant, about cloaking one’s near-penniless son in the garments of a wealthy merchant. Was this aspiration, irony, or simply the habitual reach of a painter who had always thought in terms of borrowed roles? The question hangs over the image without resolution.
The face, however, refuses all theatre. Lit from the left, with strong shadow falling across the right side and pooling beneath the brim of the beret, Titus looks out with an expression that resists easy paraphrase. It is not quite sadness, not quite composure, not quite absence. The gaze is steady but slightly lowered, and the paint itself, applied in thin, dragged strokes across the forehead and thicker impasto along the bridge of the nose, seems to hesitate between precision and vulnerability. Rembrandt restricts himself to a narrow range of browns, ochres and dark reds, so that the warm accents in the hair, lips and beret are the only notes of colour in a field of near-monochrome shadow. Lelia Packer, Curator of Dutch and Pre-1600 Paintings at the Wallace Collection, has drawn attention to the economy of means here, noting how a single stroke of the brush along the right shoulder is sufficient to define the entire fall of the fabric (Packer, 2019).
It is worth pausing over the category of image this represents, because it does not quite settle into any one genre. Rembrandt painted Titus repeatedly in the 1650s and 1660s, and across these likenesses the boy appears variously as himself, as a figure type, and as something closer to what the Dutch would have recognised as a tronie, a character study in which individual likeness serves a broader pictorial purpose. The earlier Titus at His Desk (1655, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) shows a younger, softer child absorbed in reading; the later Titus as a Monk (1660, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) places him in a Franciscan habit, where the identification as Titus has itself been questioned. The Wallace Collection portrait sits between these poles. The Venetian costume distances the image from straightforward portraiture, yet the face is so particular, so clearly observed, that the viewer cannot treat it as a stock figure. Does it matter whether Rembrandt intended this as a portrait for the market or as a private record? The two categories were never as separate in seventeenth-century Amsterdam as modern viewers tend to assume, and Rembrandt, more than most, moved freely across that boundary.
The family history shadowing the picture is well known but still difficult to absorb. Titus was the only surviving child of Rembrandt’s marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612–1642), whose three previous children had all died in infancy. Saskia herself died in 1642, barely a year after Titus’s birth, leaving a will that granted Rembrandt the usufruct of her estate on condition that he did not remarry (Schwartz, 2006, p. 188). This stipulation shaped the remainder of Rembrandt’s domestic life: his relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels, which produced a daughter, Cornelia (b. 1654), could never be formalised without forfeiting Titus’s inheritance. Hendrickje died in 1663. Titus himself married Magdalena van Loo (1641–1669) in February 1668 but died that September, probably of plague, before the birth of his daughter, Titia, in March 1669. Rembrandt followed his son to the grave on 4 October 1669 and was buried in the Westerkerk.
The painting’s own later history carries a quieter but instructive drama. It was acquired by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870), at the sale of the collection of King Willem II of the Netherlands in The Hague in 1850, for 6,000 florins. When the Wallace Collection was bequeathed to the British nation by Lady Wallace in 1897, twelve paintings were accepted as autograph Rembrandts. Over the following century, one after another fell to connoisseurial scrutiny. By 1986, as the Rembrandt Research Project continued its rigorous programme of disattribution, this portrait of Titus was the only painting in the collection to have retained an uncontested attribution to Rembrandt himself (Van de Wetering, 2014). Christopher Brown subsequently restored several other works to Rembrandt’s hand, including the Self-Portrait in a Black Cap (c.1637), which now hangs opposite the Titus in the same first-floor gallery, creating a silent dialogue between father and son across the room. But the fact remains that for a decade, this single painting was the only genuine Rembrandt the Wallace Collection could claim.
Today the canvas sits inside a heavy nineteenth-century frame whose ornamental excess sits uneasily against the restraint of the image it contains. The gilded scrollwork and raised moulding belong to a different sensibility altogether, one that wanted old master paintings to look expensive. Whether the Wallace Collection would ever consider reframing is another question, but the contrast is instructive: it shows how thoroughly later taste can misread the intentions of a painting that works precisely through reduction, through the refusal of decorative surplus.
What remains, when the frame and the biography and the attribution history are set aside, is a picture of a boy who had no business looking this old. Rembrandt does not sentimentalise him and does not heroicise him. He simply paints what is there: a face shaped by circumstance, lit by a narrow fall of light, and held in a silence that the viewer is left to interpret for themselves.
References
Crenshaw, P. (2006) Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art Market in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwartz, G. (2006) Rembrandt’s Universe: His Art, His Life, His World. London: Thames & Hudson
Strauss, W. and Van der Meulen, M. (eds.) (1979) The Rembrandt Documents. New York: Abaris Books
Van de Wetering, E. (2014) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited – A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt , Portrait of Titus, c. 1657. RKDimages, image no. 232768. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/232768 (Accessed: 26 June 2023)
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
In the summer of 1638, Rembrandt was living with his wife Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612–1642) in rented rooms on the Binnen Amstel in Amsterdam, in a house known locally as the Suikerbackerij, the Confectionery. By then he was the most sought-after painter in the city, managing a busy workshop and negotiating the final stages of his Passion series for Stadholder Frederick Henry (1584–1647), a commission brokered by the state secretary and connoisseur Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and the most prestigious that the young painter had yet received. On 22 July 1638, Saskia gave birth to a daughter christened Cornelia, named for Rembrandt’s mother. Three weeks later, on 13 August, the infant was buried. She was their second child to die: their firstborn son Rumbartus, baptised in December 1635, had survived barely two months. A second daughter, also named Cornelia, born in July 1640, would likewise live only days. Somewhere in the midst of this year of professional triumph and private grief, Rembrandt signed and dated, on the face of the tomb itself, a small panel painting of the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden.
The painting takes its subject from John 20:11–18, the most circumstantial of the gospel accounts of the events at the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene has stayed behind alone after Peter and the beloved disciple have departed. Weeping, she stoops to look inside the sepulchre and sees two angels seated where the body had lain. She turns, and finds a man standing behind her whom she takes to be the gardener. ‘Sir,’ she says, ‘if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him.’ He speaks a single word, her name, and she recognises him. Most painters who treated this episode chose the moment that follows: the Noli me tangere, the risen Christ’s command to Mary not to touch him, which offered a dramatic exchange of gestures and a visually legible confrontation between sacred and human bodies. Rembrandt does something different, and arguably more difficult. He pauses the narrative a beat earlier, at the instant before recognition breaks through. Mary kneels, twisting her body towards a figure she has not yet understood, her face lit with searching expectation. The scene is held at the threshold of a disclosure that has not yet occurred, and the painting’s psychological force depends on this suspension.
Christ stands in the centre of the composition, directly aligned with the distant silhouette of a temple-like structure evoking Jerusalem, so that his partially silhouetted vertical form draws the eye upward from the dark mouth of the tomb to the first light of dawn. He is dressed as a working gardener: broad-brimmed hat, a spade in one hand, a pruning knife tucked into his belt. This iconography was not Rembrandt’s invention. The motif of Christ as gardener had circulated in northern European art since at least the early fifteenth century and had been codified in printed bibles produced in the Low Countries between 1481 and 1540, where gardening implements, a wide hat, and a city in the background were standard attributes. Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) woodcut of the Noli me tangere from the Small Passion (1509–11) shows Christ holding a hoe with a halo, while Lucas van Leyden’s (c. 1494–1533) engraving of the subject includes the gardener’s hat, the ointment jar, a tree, and a distant city. Rembrandt almost certainly owned impressions of both prints: his 1656 insolvency inventory records a substantial collection of works by Dürer and Lucas. But where these earlier images tend to present Christ in a costume that sits lightly over an already divine figure, Rembrandt takes the disguise seriously. His Christ is a sturdy man dressed for labour, his sleeves pushed to the elbow, his robe belted for movement. The shovel is not a prop; it is at the ready.
Behind Christ and Mary Magdalene stands a tree, a detail that Rembrandt inherits from earlier iconographies but that carries a particular weight in the Reformed exegetical tradition. As Bobbi Dykema has argued in her study of this painting as a Calvinist visual typology, the tree deliberately invokes the tree behind Adam and Eve in images of the Fall, casting Christ and Mary as a new Adam and a new Eve. The garden of Arimathea becomes a second Eden, and the gardener is recast as the cultivator of a restored creation. This typological layering, in which Old Testament and New Testament episodes are figured as mirroring one another, was central to Reformed preaching and to Dutch bible illustration. Whether Rembrandt consciously intended the parallel or simply absorbed it from the visual and textual culture around him is an open question, but the composition encourages the reading: the tree leans over the two figures like a silent witness, and the neatly trimmed box hedge in the foreground establishes the setting as a tended, purposeful garden rather than a wilderness.
Rembrandt enriches the composition with secondary episodes drawn from the synoptic gospels rather than from John alone. Two angels keep vigil at the empty tomb, their pale forms barely distinguishable from the rock. On the left, two women descend a flight of steps, a detail that corresponds to the three Marys mentioned in Mark and Luke rather than to John’s account, which names only Mary Magdalene. Their presence is a quiet liberty, a compression of separate gospel traditions into a single pictorial field. Beyond them, in the dim half-light, the apostles are already departing, their silhouettes receding towards the city. The sky above flushes with the first light of dawn, and this opalescent radiance picks out, selectively, the towers of the Temple of Jerusalem, the upper half of Christ’s figure, and the upturned face of the Magdalene.
The paint itself is thin, almost monochrome, as though Rembrandt were working close to the tonal register of a drawing or an etching. Colour is withheld from most of the surface and released only in the warm tones of Mary’s mantle and the cool blaze of Christ’s robe, so that light does the work of declaring significance.
The painting is one of only two occasions on which Rembrandt treated this subject. The second, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, is dated 1651 and is compositionally and tonally different: there Christ appears without the gardener’s attributes, in his burial shroud, and the mood is quieter, more intimate, less staged. The Rembrandt Research Project catalogued the Greenwich panel as no. A 124 in volume III of the Corpus (1989) and as no. 158 in volume VI (2015), confirming its autograph status. It is signed and dated, somewhat indistinctly, on the tomb at right: Rembrandt ft. 1638.
The year 1638 placed this painting at a significant junction in Rembrandt’s development. He was completing the Resurrection for the Passion series, the final work to be delivered to the Stadholder’s gallery at the Binnenhof in The Hague. In a letter to Huygens, Rembrandt had already suggested that the Ascension would ‘show to the best advantage in the gallery of His Excellency since there is a strong light there’, evidence that he was thinking carefully about how his religious paintings would function in specific settings. The Greenwich panel, by contrast, is a small, private picture, intended for close looking. Its restrained palette and intimate scale suggest a work made for domestic devotion or for a particular patron rather than for display, and the thinness of the paint, which approaches grisaille in places, gives it something of the contemplative character of Rembrandt’s etchings of biblical subjects. This was also the period in which Rembrandt was painting Belshazzar’s Feast (c. 1635–38, National Gallery, London) and the Landscape with a Stone Bridge (c. 1638, Rijksmuseum), works that show him moving between dramatic spectacle and quiet observation with unusual freedom. What links them is not a single style but an attention to the fall of light, to the way illumination discovers form and gives it meaning.
The contrast between the darkness surrounding the tomb and the arriving dawn is the painting’s central organising principle, and it is at once physical and theological. In the Reformed tradition, the sunrise at Easter carried a specific typological charge: it was the dawn not merely of a new day but of a new dispensation, the visible analogue of the passage from death to life, from the old covenant to the new. Rembrandt handles this with characteristic understatement. The light does not stream from the risen body, as it does in many Italian and Flemish treatments; it enters from the left as the natural light of morning, falling equally on Christ and on Mary. There is no supernatural aureole, no emanation. The risen Christ is lit as a gardener would be lit, standing in a garden at first light, and the theological claim is embedded in the ordinary world rather than imposed upon it. Whether this reflects a specifically Calvinist sensibility, a personal temperament, or simply a painter’s instinct for the way light actually works in the early hours is one of those questions that the painting raises without resolving.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
References
Bruyn, J., Haak, B., Levie, S.H., van Thiel, P.J.J. and van de Wetering, E. (1989) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. III: 1635–1642. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project).
Dykema, B. (2012) ‘Woman, Why Weepest Thou? Rembrandt’s 1638 Noli me tangere as a Dutch Calvinist Visual Typology’, in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages through the Baroque. Leiden: Brill
Klessmann, R. (1988) ‘Rembrandts “Noli Me Tangere” — Mit den Augen eines Dichters gesehen’, Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, 27, pp. 89–100
McNamara, S. (2015) Rembrandt’s Passion Series. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Perlove, S. and Silver, L. (2009) Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb, 1638. RKDimages, image no. 47566. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/47566 (Accessed: 20 June 2023).
Van de Wetering, E. (2011) ‘Rembrandt — The risen Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene [“Noli me tangere”]’, in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. V. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project), pp. 516 ff.
Van de Wetering, E. (2015) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. VI. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project), no. 158.
Lodewijk van der Helst (1642–1693), Portrait of Willem van de Velde the Younger, 1672. Oil on canvas, 103 × 91 cm. Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich, London, on loan from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Lodewijk van der Helst (1642–1693), Portrait of Willem van de Velde the Younger, 1672. Oil on canvas, 103 × 91 cm. Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich, London, on loan from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
This portrait of Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707), one of the leading marine painters of the seventeenth century, was painted in 1672 by Lodewijk van der Helst, a Dutch portraitist who remains less well known than his contemporaries. The sitter is shown seated before a curtain, holding in his left hand a drawing of a naval engagement while pointing with his right hand to his signature upon the sheet—a gesture that asserts both authorship and professional identity.
The date of the portrait coincides with a decisive turning point in the careers of the Van de Velde family. In 1672—the so-called Rampjaar or ‘Disaster Year’—the Dutch Republic was simultaneously at war with France, England, and Münster, while domestic political upheaval and economic collapse devastated the art market. Many artists were forced to seek patronage abroad, and it was in this context that Willem the Elder (1611–1693) and Willem the Younger moved from Amsterdam to London. There they secured the support of Charles II and established themselves as the foremost marine painters at the English court.
The portrait also underscores the significance of the family’s drawing practice. Willem the Elder had achieved particular renown for his pen drawings of sea battles, executed with extraordinary precision, which provided the basis for many of the oil paintings produced by both father and son. Even after their relocation to England, the Van de Veldes continued to rely on this close relationship between drawing and painting, adapting it to English commissions.
The circumstances of the commission for Van der Helst’s portrait remain uncertain. Yet it clearly serves to honour Willem the Younger’s status as a marine artist, affirming his reputation at a moment of personal and professional transition. Portraits of fellow artists were not uncommon in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, functioning both as tributes to artistic accomplishment and as records of networks within the profession. In this case, Van der Helst’s work stands as a rare visual testimony to one of the most important Dutch artistic migrations of the period.
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 (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.
Caspar Netscher (1639–1684), The Lace Maker, 1662, Oil on canvas, 33 × 27 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
Caspar Netscher (1639–1684), The Lace Maker, 1662. Oil on canvas, 33 × 27 cm. The Wallace Collection, London
Painted in The Hague in 1662, this small canvas belongs to Netscher’s earliest phase, before his move to the refined courtly portraits that later defined his career. A young woman sits absorbed in the intricate labour of bobbin lace-making, her tools and threads rendered with studied care. She wears a modest woollen gown and a finely worked indoor cap embroidered with blackwork foliage, a style that had entered Dutch fashion from Spain. Unlike the stiff bodices of wealthier matrons, her loose garment suggests the freedom of movement required for long hours at her craft.
The domestic setting is plain but pointed. Her shoes lie discarded on the floor, and a broom stands in the corner, marking the boundaries between indoor service and the outside world. Netscher introduces other, more curious details: small shells placed beside the shoes, seemingly without purpose. It is in such details that the painting speaks the emblematic language so familiar to seventeenth-century audiences. The rhetorical societies of the Low Countries, with their plays, poems, and emblemata books, provided artists with a rich vocabulary of objects and their hidden meanings. A shell could allude to beauty and attraction, echoing contemporary verse that likened women to pearls within shells. Shoes left aside might hint at intimacy or transgression. For viewers trained in this culture of wit and double meaning, these objects offered interpretive puzzles as much as descriptive truth.
In this way Netscher’s Lacemaker operates on two levels. It presents an image of quiet domestic virtue, the young woman intent upon her task, embodying the diligence praised in moral literature. At the same time, through a handful of carefully chosen objects, it engages with a wider discourse of allegory, drawing upon popular literature and the folkloric traditions maintained by the chambers of rhetoric. The result is a painting that transcends mere observation of daily life, inviting its audience to weigh labour, virtue, temptation, and desire within a single intimate scene.
Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), The Guitar Player, c.1670. Oil on canvas, 53 × 46.3 cm. English Heritage, Kenwood House, London
Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), The Guitar Player, c.1670. Oil on canvas, 53 × 46.3 cm. English Heritage, Kenwood House, London
Painted in Delft around 1670, The Guitar Player depicts a young woman seated with a baroque guitar, her glance turning outward with an immediacy unusual in Vermeer’s work. The guitar itself was a novel instrument in the Dutch Republic of the late seventeenth century, its Spanish origins and fashionable associations marking it as both exotic and modern. Its appearance in the painting situates the work within a broader cultural context in which music-making was not only a genteel accomplishment but also a medium freighted with allegorical meaning.
In Dutch art of the Golden Age, musical instruments carried a rich range of associations. They could symbolise harmony within marriage, the fleeting pleasures of earthly life, or, more specifically, the coded rituals of courtship. The guitar in particular, with its relatively simple chords and strummed accompaniments, was often connected with spontaneity and amorous expression, qualities distinct from the more cerebral reputation of the lute. Vermeer’s choice of subject therefore reflects a moment of cultural transition, and the woman’s animated expression — smiling, alert, caught in an instant of interruption — conveys a vitality that distinguishes this work from his more restrained musical interiors such as The Music Lesson (Royal Collection, London) or The Concert (formerly Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston).
The painting is also significant for its technical handling. The characteristic left-hand fall of light illuminates the sitter’s yellow jacket and the polished surface of the guitar, but the brushwork is less precise than in Vermeer’s earlier pictures. The looseness of his modelling and the freer use of colour lend the canvas a more spontaneous character, consistent with the subject’s sense of immediacy. The painting was never relined on anew support, an unusual survival that preserves the original canvas and support and allows us to sense its fragile, unaltered state, although at the cost of physical vulnerability.
The work also has an extraordinary modern history. In February 1974 it was stolen from Kenwood House in a notorious art theft that drew widespread attention. The empty frame was discovered discarded on Hampstead Heath in North London, while the painting itself resurfaced months later in the cemetery of St Bartholomew’s, propped against a gravestone, wrapped in newspaper and bound with string. Although ultimately recovered, the perpetrators were never identified, and the episode only deepened the aura of mystery that has long surrounded Vermeer’s small and fragile oeuvre of thirty-six paintings.
