Portrait of a 62-year-old Woman, possibly Aeltje Pietersdr Uylenburgh

Rembrandt painted this Portrait of a 62-year-old Woman in 1632, possibly depicting Aeltje Pietersdr. Uylenburgh, a relative of Saskia van Uylenburgh whom Rembrandt would marry in 1634. The painting dates from his first year in Amsterdam, when he had joined Hendrick Uylenburgh's commercial enterprise producing portraits for the city's prosperous merchant class. Rembrandt's ability to capture old age with unflinching honesty — the soft flesh, the accumulated experience visible in the face — set him apart from portraitists who softened their older sitters toward idealized youth. Where Van Dyck and Rubens deployed sophisticated compositional flattery, Rembrandt insisted on the psychological truth of age as a form of dignity in itself. This refusal to flatter later cost him fashionable commissions as Amsterdam's merchant elite developed a taste for the smoother, more polished style of his pupils Gerard Dou and Govert Flinck. The Mauritshuis's holding of the canvas places it alongside the other great Rembrandt portraits — Simeon in the Temple, Saul and David — that make the museum one of the finest repositories of his early Amsterdam work.

The sitter's face emerges from the dark background with Rembrandt's characteristic warm lighting, while the elaborate millstone ruff is rendered with precise, almost microscopic attention to the starched lace pleats.