概要信息：

Rembrandt is the most famous of the seventeenth-century Dutch painters. However, there are 
doubts whether some paintings attributed to Rembrandt were actually painted by him. One such 
painting is known as attributed to Rembrandt because of its style, and indeed the representation of 
the woman’s face is very much like that of portraits known to be by Rembrandt. But there are 
problems with the painting that suggest it could not be a work by Rembrandt.
First, there is something inconsistent about the way the woman in the portrait is dressed. She is 
wearing a white linen cap of a kind that only servants would wear – yet the coat she is wearing has 
a luxurious fur collar that no servant could afford. Rembrandt, who was known for his attention to 
the details of his subjects’ clothing, would not have been guilty of such an inconsistency.
Second, Rembrandt was a master of painting light and shadow, but in this painting these elements 
do not fit together. The face appears to be illuminated by light reflected onto it from below. But 
below the face is the dark fur collar, which would absorb light rather than reflect it. So the face 
should appear partially in shadow-which is not how it appears. Rembrandt would never have made 
such an error.
Finally, examination of the back of the painting reveals that it was painted on a panel made of 
several pieces of wood glued together. Although Rembrandt often painted on wood panels, no 
painting known to be by Rembrandt uses a panel glued together in this way from several pieces of 
wood.
For these reasons the painting was removed from the official catalog of Rembrandt’s paintings in 
the 1930s.