Girl at a Window Jean-Antoine also a painter

also a painter

except for the fact that the Virgin is looking heavenward

but his special status - he was already an established master in his own right - is demonstrated by the fact that he did not scruple to 'improve' the composition to suit his own ideas

Jan Both was one of the most influential and important of the Dutch Italianate painters

Until 1880 given to Mola and then catalogued as Italian School

Girl at a Window Jean-Antoine also a painterPainted in 1645 when Rembrandt was thirty nine, the painting has always been the subject of speculation and conflicting interpretations. A frequently quoted account by the French art theorist and early owner of the work, Roger de Piles (1635 1709), of passers by seeing it in a window and mistaking it for a real flesh and blood girl, is probably more of a general comment on Rembrandt's ability to seduce his viewers with an illusion than a strictly