A Girl with a Broom

A young girl with red hair and hazel eyes leans over the gate of a wooden fence, broom held to her chest, and gazes directly at the viewer from behind a low partition; soft light from the upper left models her ivory-white shirt and pumpkin-orange braces against the caramel-brown wall, while the dark mouth of a well and an overturned pail occupy the shadowy foreground. Begun in Rembrandt’s workshop in the late 1640s and completed and signed by 1651, the picture was long treasured as one of Rembrandt’s most sensitive genre scenes and passed as such from the collection of Herman Becker through Pierre Crozat and Catherine the Great’s Hermitage, where it hung for a century and a half before Andrew Mellon bought it in 1931. Modern scholarship gives the picture to the master’s immediate circle — probably Carel Fabritius, whose nuanced modeling of the face and bravura brushwork in the sleeves mark him as the most capable hand in the workshop. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.