A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

775. AN OLD LADY.

Rembrandt (Dutch: 1606-1669). See 45.

An old lady, eighty-three years of age (as the inscription shows). This splendid portrait is dated 1634, and was made therefore when Rembrandt was twenty-eight. His mother was from the first a favourite sitter of his, and hence, perhaps, the affectionate fidelity with which he always painted the wrinkled faces of old age. In the British Museum there is an Indian-ink copy of this portrait, from which it appears that the lady's name was Françoise van Wasserhoven. Rembrandt, says M. Michel, "is most individual and moving in those portraits of old women, in which by the accidents of form and feature he so admirably suggests the moral life."