The Girl in a Picture Frame

Step close and look at the hands. They are painted quickly, with thick strokes of pale paint over the dark wood of the frame, and they cast a real shadow onto it. That trick of illusion was popular in the Netherlands, where painters competed to fool the eye, but Rembrandt uses it with unusual freedom: the dress is a broad mass of red, the background a dark void, the face finished with tender care. The panel is signed and dated sixteen forty one, the year before the Night Watch, when the artist was at the height of his success in Amsterdam. Who the girl was is unknown; she may have been a model, or a fashionable portrait sitter who enjoyed the joke.

The painting has a long journey behind it. It belonged to King Stanisław August, whose collection was dispersed after his death, and in eighteen fifteen it was bought by Kazimierz Rzewuski together with the Scholar at the Lectern that hangs beside it. Both passed by inheritance to the Lanckoroński family in Vienna, survived the war in a Swiss bank vault, and were given to the castle in nineteen ninety four by Karolina Lanckorońska, then in her nineties. They are two of only three Rembrandts in Poland.

Did You Know? For nearly two centuries the painting hung in Vienna, and it came home to Warsaw in nineteen ninety four as a gift from a countess in her nineties.