Old Woman Cutting Her Nails
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
Long attributed to Rembrandt, this painting represents an old woman cutting her nails in a darkened room. A dramatic fall of light veils her eyes but casts light on her hands engaged in a seemingly humdrum activity. A sewing box and cloth on the table behind her suggest that this is a scene from ordinary life. However, she is dressed in a fur-trimmed robe in rich browns and with a veil of a muted gold color, which hint at something perhaps rather out of the ordinary. A brief look at Rembrandt’s career might shed more light on our picture and its possible meaning.
Both Rembrandt’s style and subject matter evolved considerably over the course of his lifetime. Most artists of seventeenth-century Holland were specialists, often choosing the subject category practiced by their apprentice masters and painting only, say, still lifes for the length of their careers: one artist, for example, spent his whole life painting pictures of asparagus. Not so Rembrandt. Originally he apprenticed to Pieter Lastman, a history painter. Histories, in the seventeenth-century hierarchy, were the most exalted of subjects, including not just history, but also literature, mythology, and the Bible. Landscape, portrait, and still life were considered less serious, and history painters targeted connoisseurs with literary and artistic tastes. Even if the subject were a religious one, history paintings seemed to be aesthetic, not devotional, in nature.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on Art from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
more from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
Errands into the Moral Wilderness
Forms of Christian Family Witness & Renewal by Allan C. Carlson
28.3—May/June 2015
Whittaker Chambers's Lonely War Against Godless Collectivism by Hunter Baker
19.4—May 2006
The Culture War Is Between Religious Believers on Both Sides by Howard P. Kainz
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
