1675. PORTRAIT OF AN OLD LADY.
Rembrandt (Dutch: 1606-1669). See 45.
A noble portrait. Rembrandt was a painter who reverenced old age, and gave its dignity and beauty to faces the least promising. We may notice especially the pathetic eyes,—with an expression at once so living and so sorrowful, and the character in the hands which Rembrandt never failed to give his sitters. The old lady wears a large white ruff, "evidently clinging to the costume of her earlier years, for ruffs had long been out of fashion at the time when the picture was painted." The picture has been known as the Burgomaster's Wife, but this description is without authority or probability. There is another portrait of the same old lady in Lord Wantage's possession (No. 15 in the Academy Exhibition, 1899). Lord Wantage's picture is dated 1661.
The two magnificent pictures just described, which hold their own triumphantly even on a wall of masterpieces,[251] were formerly in possession of Sir William Middleton, Bart., great-uncle to Lady de Saumarez, and were exhibited at the British Institution in 1858. Since that date they had been lost to sight until they were purchased for the National Gallery in 1899.[252] They are believed to have been in possession of the Lee family, Lady de Saumarez's ancestors, from the time that they were painted, but they may have come into the family with a certain John van Enkoren, a Dutch gentleman, who married a second cousin of Sir William Middleton.