Joseph und Potiphars Frau

Rembrandt painted the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, told in the thirty-ninth chapter of Genesis, in 1655 — the German title on the museum’s record means “Joseph and Potiphar’s wife”. Catalogued in Berlin as inventory 828H, the canvas entered the collection in 1883, bought from Sir John Neeld of Grittleton House in Wiltshire through the Paris dealer Charles Sedelmeyer. Rembrandt was born in Leiden in 1606 and died in Amsterdam in 1669; he had left Leiden for Amsterdam in the early 1630s and the pictures of his last two decades, painted for himself as much as for a market, are the most freely worked of his career. The Gemäldegalerie’s group of his paintings is one of the largest in the world, and grew out of the Prussian royal collection opened to the public on Berlin’s Museumsinsel in the nineteenth century. The painting is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.