Rembrandt van Rijn, Studies of the Head of Saskia and Others, Dutch, 1606 - 1669, 1636, etching
Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh, came from a patrician family in Leeuwarden, the capital of the province of Friesland; her father served as the town’s burgomaster. Hendrik van Uylenburgh, Saskia’s cousin, was a painter and flourishing art dealer in Amsterdam. After moving to Amsterdam Rembrandt invested in Van Uylenburgh’s business and came to live in the art dealer’s house. The promising young painter must have met Saskia soon thereafter. They married in 1634, a year after their betrothal, and were together until her death in 1642. The couple had four children, but only Titus, born in 1641, survived infancy.Rembrandt’s many drawings, etchings, and paintings of Saskia have left us with varied depictions of her personality, including her warmth and tenderness, but also a certain aloofness; her zest for life, but also the debilitating illness that frequently weakened her after the mid-1630s. Rembrandt probably began this painting around 1634–1635, shortly after their marriage. Saskia, wearing a fashionable dress, glances over her right shoulder.
Of what Rembrandt really was we can know but little except through his paintings, his etchings, his drawings. His extreme absorption in work, which during his good days was a happiness and during his bad days a relief, separated him as a great worker, little known to the men of his day, in such a way at least as we might have fair
