The Jewish Bride

The painting known as The Jewish Bride — a title coined by the Amsterdam art dealer Jan van Dijk only in the early nineteenth century, based on a misidentification of the male figure as a Jewish father adorning his daughter — is among the most discussed and universally admired paintings in Western art. The actual identities of the couple remain debated: they may represent Isaac and Rebecca from Genesis 26, observed through a window by the Philistine king Abimelech; they may be a real Amsterdam couple depicted in biblical dress for a wedding portrait; or they may be Rembrandt's son Titus and his bride Magdalena van Loo, married in 1668. Whatever the iconographic program, the painting's power derives from the gesture at its center: the man's right hand rests on the woman's breast, and her left hand covers his fingers, creating a moment of physical and emotional tenderness that Vincent van Gogh, who saw the painting in the Rijksmuseum, said he would give ten years of his life to sit before for two weeks. The technique in the costumes — thick impasto built up in ridges and valleys that catch real light — has no parallel in seventeenth-century painting.

Rembrandt's late technique reaches its most lavish expression in the thick impasto of the golden and crimson costumes, applied with palette knife and brush in an almost sculptural manner. The hands—the painting's emotional center—are modeled with exquisite sensitivity within the surrounding richness of paint.