Saskia, and painting your own wife into history 

Saskia van Uylenburgh was the daughter of a burgomaster of Leeuwarden and a cousin of Hendrick van Uylenburgh, the dealer who had brought Rembrandt to Amsterdam. They married in 1634. It was a good match for a miller's son, and it came with a dowry, a social circle and the kind of respectability that reassures clients.

It also gave him a model who was always available. Saskia appears throughout the following eight years in a way no client ever could, because a client sits once, in the pose that has been agreed, wearing the clothes they wish to be remembered in. Saskia is drawn in bed, ill, propped on pillows. She is drawn at a window in a few quick lines of silverpoint, made shortly after their engagement. She is painted in a wide brimmed hat with a feather, in fur, in pearls, in fancy dress that no Amsterdam woman would have worn on the street.

Some of those pictures are not portraits at all in the modern sense. She becomes Flora, crowned with flowers, standing in a fictional pastoral world. She lends her features to biblical women. This was a normal habit of the period, borrowing a familiar face for a history painting, and it tells you something about how Rembrandt worked: he needed a real body in real light before he could invent anything convincing.

The domestic record is harder to read than the paintings suggest. Three children born to the couple died in infancy. A fourth, Titus, born in 1641, survived. Saskia died in 1642, probably from tuberculosis, at about thirty. Her will left her estate in trust for Titus, with the income available to Rembrandt as long as he did not remarry, a clause that would shape the rest of his household arrangements and cause him real trouble later.

What changes in the work after 1642 is not the technique so much as the temperature. The theatrical costumes thin out. The sitters get quieter. The etchings of the later 1640s are full of ordinary interiors and ordinary bodies, and the biblical scenes move indoors, into small rooms lit by one source.

It is tempting to read grief directly off a canvas, and it is worth resisting. What can be said with confidence is that the painter who had spent a decade dressing up the people he loved spent the next decade looking at people without costumes, and that this is where his reputation for honesty begins.

The same year Saskia died, he delivered the enormous militia portrait that everyone now knows by the wrong name.