Catalogue entry no. 69 by William W. Robinson:
In his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings, Otto Benesch questioned the attribution of this sheet of studies to Rembrandt because he could not reconcile its technique and presumed date. The fluidity of the lines and breadth of the washes are, Benesch affirmed, characteristic of Rembrandt’s work after 1635, but the old-fashioned ruff worn by the woman at the upper right of the sheet convinced him that the study originated no later than the early thirties. Neither the reviewers of his book nor scholars who have subsequently written about the work have shared Benesch’s doubts about Rembrandt’s authorship, although they have not been able to reach a consensus regarding its date.
Comparison with works executed by Rembrandt around 1638–40 establishes both the autograph status and date of the Harvard drawing. The pen lines resemble the strokes in the figure of a seated woman and the variant sketch of her hair and its ornaments in a preparatory work, now called Studies of a Woman Reading, Seen from Behind, and a Man Wearing a Turban (Fig. 1), for Rembrandt’s 1638 etching Joseph Telling His Dreams. The lost profile and decorated hair of the head at the lower right of the Harvard drawing recall the heads of seated women in Joseph Telling His Dreams and another print, Death of the Virgin, the latter dated 1639. A study in the Musée du Louvre of a mother holding her child (Fig. 2), datable to around 1640, shares several technical traits with the Harvard sheet. Compare particularly the hatchings in areas of shadow and the strokes that describe the hair. Finally, the integration of white opaque watercolor for broad pictorial effects, as in the head at the lower right, occurs in other drawings of the later 1630s.
Rembrandt executed the Harvard study primarily as a detailed record of the strikingly dressed and decorated hair of a young girl. The etchings cited above, among other works, attest to the expressive role of imaginatively arranged female hair in Rembrandt’s art of the 1630s, so it is no surprise that this real-life example caught his eye. Marieke de Winkel notes that the artist evidently drew the girl while she was being dressed because she wears a nachthalsdoek (peignoir), which women and girls wore during their toilette. In all three studies, he recorded the headband that gathered the hair in the back and the forelock that was pulled over it and plaited at the top. Other plaits hang loose at the side and back of her head. Ben Broos has tentatively proposed that the child depicted in the drawing might be Antje van Loo, a niece and goddaughter of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh. In 1641, Antje’s father traveled from Friesland to Amsterdam to attend the baptism of Titus van Rijn, the son of Rembrandt and Saskia, and Broos has identified this visit as the probable occasion of Rembrandt’s drawing. That Rembrandt drew the child during her toilette might, as Marieke de Winkel has observed, support the hypothesis that she was a relative whom the artist could have seen during such a private moment. However appealing, Broos’s suggestion is speculative, as he concedes. While documents confirm that Antje’s father was present at the baptism of Titus, we do not know whether his six-year-old daughter accompanied him. It is uncertain that Rembrandt executed the drawing in 1641. The dating of the study to that year depends in part on its association with a 1641 double portrait of Cornelis Claesz. Anslo and his wife, Aeltje Schouten, which is doubtful (see below). Finally, there is nothing about the girl’s hairdo and costume that would identify her as Frisian, although, as De Winkel pointed out, elite Frisians such as the Van Loo family would not in any case have worn regional costume.
The head of an older woman in the Harvard study has been related to the Anslo–Schouten double portrait mentioned above. There, Aeltje Schouten wears a similar cap, as well as the type of collar worn by the woman in the drawing. Yet the resemblance of Aeltje to the woman in the Harvard sketch is probably coincidental—neither the facial features nor the positions of the heads correspond—so the drawing should not be considered a preliminary study for the portrait. Like the drawings of the girl’s hair, it is most likely a sketch from life.
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