Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride shows a couple in a tender embrace, and most scholars read them as Isaac and Rebecca from the Book of Genesis, though Rembrandt never said who they are. Painted around 1665 and now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, it shows a man resting his hand on a woman's chest while she lays her hand over his. Its title is the least reliable thing about it: the word "bride" comes from a banker's note written in 1833.
The canvas is large, 121.5 by 166.5 centimeters. It hangs in the Rijksmuseum on loan from the City of Amsterdam, as part of the A. van der Hoop Bequest, and it is still listed only as "known as The Jewish Bride."
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The earliest known description of the painting is an auction catalogue from London, dated 1828, more than a century and a half after Rembrandt painted it. The London dealer John Smith, who had bought the canvas in 1825 for 5,000 guilders, listed it as lot 67 under the title Jephthah and his Daughter, after the biblical father who sacrificed his child.
The painting did not sell, and Smith bought it back himself for 420 guineas. That first known title has nothing to do with a bride. Everything anyone has called these two people since was added by dealers, collectors and scholars, and most of it was read off a single gesture, the hand on the chest.
A name from a banker's list
Adriaan van der Hoop, the Amsterdam banker whose bequest the painting belongs to, bought the canvas from Smith in 1833 for 6,825 guilders. In his list he described it as the Jewish bride, adorned by her father with a necklace. That sentence is the origin of Het Joodse bruidje, the painting's Dutch name.
Smith himself kept changing the title. His 1836 catalogue of Rembrandt's paintings called it The Birthday Salutation. The banker's version, with its bride and its necklace, is the one that stuck.
Nothing in the canvas shows a father handing over a necklace. A man's hand rests on a woman's chest and she covers it with hers. The necklace reading is no longer accepted. I think it says more about 1833 than about 1665: a collector looked at tenderness and saw a present, because a present was easier to explain.
The reading most scholars prefer today comes from a Genesis story in which a husband lies about his wife.
What You'll Discover
Who the couple are pretending to be.
What lay hidden under the paint.
Who may have posed for Rembrandt.
What Van Gogh would give to sit before it.