Rembrandt was an astonishingly versatile artist who excelled in all the genres of painting, drawing and printmaking. He is now best known for his portraits, but his output included biblical, mythological and even landscape subjects. This painting, however, defies any easy classification. A half-dressed woman pushes aside a curtain and leans forward from her bed, peering past us with an expression poised somewhere between anxiety and curiosity. The sensitive characterisation of her features seems to have been based on a real likeness and, over the years, the unknown woman has been identified variously with Rembrandt’s wife Saskia, his son’s nurse­maid Geertje Dircks and the housekeeper Hendrickje Stoffels, who later became the artist’s mistress. But the dramatic pose and details such as the woman’s curious cap or the lavish bed with its fine embroi­dered sheets all suggest that some wider narrative is at play. 
The composition has been linked to a painting by Rembrandt’s teacher Pieter Lastman that depicts Sarah, the wife of Tobias from a story from the Old Testament Apocryphal Book of Tobit. Sarah had lost seven husbands on their wedding nights to the demon of lust, Asmodeus. With the help of the Archangel Raphael, Tobias defeated the demon and Sarah became his wife. In our picture, Rembrandt could be portraying Sarah as the anxious spectator who had good reason to lean out of bed and to encourage her bridegroom on to victory.

Tempting though it is, we should probably be wary of too literal an interpretation of the picture, either as a likeness of one of the women in Rembrandt’s life or as a biblical subject. It is possible that the painting was intended for a learned patron who would have been able to extrapolate a wider story from this single figure. It seems more likely, however, that Rembrandt preferred to leave the subject open for the viewer to interpret. His focus – and ours – is on the physical presence of the woman and her emotional reaction to what she is experiencing. After the idealised and remote beauty of so many nudes in Western art it is something of a shock to be confronted with the hefty bulk of this lady who pushes forward into our space. It is unclear whether we should be seduced or startled by the intimacy of this encounter and, in the end, this most inventive of artists seems to prefer ambiguity and mystery above storytelling, requiring instead that we exercise our imagination as we respond to his work.

This great Rembrandt entered the national collection thanks to the generosity of William McEwan, founder of a once famous brewery in Edinburgh. An admirer of Dutch art, McEwan had already funded the purchase of a pair of portraits by Frans Hals for the Gallery when he offered a further £2,000 for the purchase of an important painting by Rembrandt. The President of the Royal Scottish Academy was entrusted with seeking out a significant work by the master and, after some false trails, the gift was increased to over £5,000, then a very substantial sum, in order to secure this major painting for the nation when it came up for auction in London in 1892.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.