Woman supporting the Baby

This painting by Rembrandt van Rijn was executed around 1635. It is a sketch drawn in sanguine on laid paper. The composition shows a scene from domestic life – a woman supporting a small, precariously standing child. Rembrandt often sketched genre scenes as part of his studies. He often treated these pieces as quick, cursory notes and often executed them on small sheets of paper he had at hand at the time. He produced a large number of works on this theme. The art collector and the painter’s friend himself had up to 135 of them. These drawings were modelled on people close to Rembrandt, whom he could observe in his everyday activities. Most often it was his wife, children, nannies, friends and their children and even the master’s apprentices at work.
Rembrandt’s drawings came to the Lubomirski Princes Museum in 1869 from Henryk Lubomirski’s private collection previously held at his residence in Przeworsk. During World War II, the then director of the Ossolineum, Mieczysław Gębarowicz, decided to pack up the works and send them secretly to Cracow in order to protect them from looting. The works did not return to the Museum until 1956 and today constitute the largest collection of drawings by this outstanding artist in Poland.