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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.
范文
The lecture revises the idea presented in the text, that Rembrandt was not the artist who painted the famous painting "Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet”.
The inconsistency between the white cap, which identifies the woman as a servant, and the expensive fur collar she wears dissolves as the Professor explains that the fur collar was apparently painted over the original painting to increase its worth by displaying an aristocratic woman.
In addition, the assumption that light and shadow in the painting do not fit together is refuted by the fact that in the original painting, the woman wears a light cloth that illuminated her face. Thus the presentation of light and shadow was indeed very realistic and accurate, as it is characteristic of Rembrandt’s paintings.
Finally, the mystery of the panel consisting of patches glued together is also solved in the lecture. Actually, the wood panel was later enlarged to make it more grand and valuable, but the original painting was painted on a single panel, as Rembrandt would have done it. Furthermore, the wood is of the same tree used in other Rembrandt paintings, like the "Self-Portrait with a Hat”.
