Hendrickje Stoffels

Hendrickje Stoffels was disciplined by her church for living with Rembrandt, and then went into business to keep him working. She was a sergeant's daughter from Bredevoort who entered the household as a servant around 1647, when he was in his forties and a widower forbidden by his wife's will to remarry. In 1654, visibly pregnant, she was summoned three times before the council of the Reformed Church and on the fourth appearance was admonished for whoredom with the painter and barred from communion. He was not summoned at all, not being a member. Their daughter Cornelia was baptised that October and was the only one of his children to outlive him. He was declared insolvent in 1656 and everything was sold - the collection, the house on the Breestraat - and under the rules he could no longer trade as a painter. In 1660 she and Titus formed a company as art dealers and employed him as their salaried adviser, housed and fed, with everything he produced belonging to the firm. It is a legal device and it worked: the late paintings were made under it. She is generally taken to be the model for Bathsheba and for the woman wading in a stream, and the late portraits of her are unguarded in a way the commissioned work never is. She died in 1663, probably in the plague that killed a tenth of Amsterdam, and was buried in a rented grave in the Westerkerk. He outlived her by six years, and their daughter Cornelia emigrated to Batavia and named her own children after both of them.

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