A Girl with a Broom

After learning the fundamentals of drawing and painting in his native Leiden, Rembrandt van Rijn went to Amsterdam in 1624 to study for six months with Pieter Lastman (1583–1633), a famous history painter. Upon completion of his training Rembrandt returned to Leiden. Around 1632 he moved to Amsterdam, quickly establishing himself as the town’s leading artist, specializing in history paintings and portraiture. He received many commissions and attracted a number of students who came to learn his method of painting.

Leaning over the gate of a wooden fence a young girl, holding a broom, stares directly at the viewer. The fence appears to surround a well, whose dark, round form is visible in the foreground. The well is flanked by a large overturned bucket on the right and a dark object, perhaps a trough, on the left. This attractive model has been repeatedly identified as a young servant girl in Rembrandt’s household. Mainly because of the appealing features of the young girl, A Girl with a Broom was long admired as one of Rembrandt’s most sensitive genre scenes.

A Girl with a Broom appears, however, to have been executed by an artist from Rembrandt’s immediate circle rather than by the master himself. Although no documentary proof has survived that clarifies the different roles of student and assistant in Rembrandt’s workshop during the 1640s, it seems probable that the more advanced of his students, for example Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678) and Carel Fabritius worked as assistants in the workshop after they finished their apprenticeships. In all likelihood they continued to help execute paintings that would be sold under Rembrandt’s name, even after they had begun working independently and signing their own paintings. The paintings they created in Rembrandt’s workshop were often free adaptations of the master’s own compositions. Once Rembrandt accepted these works as worthy of his production, they would be inscribed with his signature and the date, and A Girl with a Broom appears to fit into this scenario. Fabritius was the artist in Rembrandt’s circle most capable of both the nuanced modeling of the face and hands and the rough bravura brushwork found in the sleeves.