The seventeenth-century Dutch school is widely viewed as the golden age of portraiture. There were countless workshops with hundreds of highly skilled assistants eager to set up their own workshops.
Although the authorship of this work remains unknown, its rendering contains echoes of Rembrandt’s output from the 1620s and 1630s, a period when his brushwork was considerably more free-flowing, half way between the overly precise technique of preceding masters and his more personal later style with thick impasto. Many young painters worked in his thriving workshop, imitating the master, and this painting could readily be attributed to his circle.
In this painting, the artist portrays a woman, dressed in black, whose face is framed by a thick white , with matching cuffs. The head of the elderly lady is covered with a black skull cap which comes to a peak over her forehead, a symbol of widowhood, purity and austerity in Protestantism. She is seated on an , beside a table with a red cover on which one can see a book.
This is a prime example of a bourgeois portrait of well-off traders and their families, with a tone of puritan austerity patently expressed in the severe palette and the restrained gesture that is particularly perceptible in portraits of elderly people.