Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace

Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace

Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace

Artist:Copy after Willem Drost (Dutch, late 17th or early 18th century)
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:33 1/8 x 24 1/2 in. (84.1 x 62.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913

The sitter bears a resemblance to Hendrickje Stoffels (born about 1625–26, died 1663), Rembrandt's common-law wife and the subject of a number of his portraits, one of which is in the Metropolitan. The picture is the work of a pupil of Rembrandt, and the strong light striking the face suggests that it may be by Barent Fabritius. Another version is in Dresden.

Catalogue Entry
The painting is an anonymous copy of Drost's Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace of about 1654 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden). Its age is difficult to determine, but a date in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century would appear likely. Compared with the original, the modeling of the face is schematic and descriptive qualities are simplified throughout, so that the precise nature of the cap, jacket, and fur wrap (draped over the woman's right arm) is unclear. The collar of the white blouse is especially conspicuous in its failure to resemble the counterpart in Dresden—or, for that matter, any kind of cloth (something like white-glazed earthenware comes to mind). The woman's expression, which in Dresden is reflective and evocative, is here rather vapid.

The picture was first published by Hofstede de Groot (1909) as Rembrandt's apparent portrait of his common-law wife Hendrickje Stoffels (compare 26.101.9, known previously only through a "copy" in Dresden attributed to Barent Fabritius. Actually, the model for the original version of this fancy picture, or tronie, may have been Drost's companion, not Rembrandt's, although the resemblance between the young woman in the Dresden painting and the figure in Drost's Portrait of a Woman (the Painter's Fiancée?) (Museum Bredius, The Hague) is less striking than in other paintings of about 1654. Van Dyke (1923) was the first author to reject the attribution to Rembrandt, calling it probably a work by Fabritius. The Met changed its attribution to Fabritius in 1937, and from "Attributed to Barent Fabritius" to "Copy after Willem Drost" in 1991.

Copyright Image
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