Saskia van Uylenburgh

Saskia van Uylenburgh brought Rembrandt his clientele, and her will eventually cost him his house. She was the youngest daughter of a burgomaster of Leeuwarden, orphaned at twelve, and a cousin of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh in whose house Rembrandt lodged and worked when he came to Amsterdam. They married in 1634. The match gave a miller's son from Leiden a dowry, a name and an entry into the patrician families who commissioned portraits. She is in a great deal of the work, and the drawings are the part that lasts: a silverpoint of her in a straw hat three days after their engagement, sketches of her ill in bed, and the etchings that use her face without ceremony. Three children died in infancy. Titus, born in 1641, survived her. She died in 1642, at thirty, probably of tuberculosis, the year of the Night Watch. The will was the trap. She left her estate to Titus with Rembrandt holding the use of it, on condition that he did not remarry - so he could not marry Geertje Dircx or Hendrickje Stoffels without losing the money, and Hendrickje was summoned before the church council for living with him as a result. When he went bankrupt in 1656 the question of what belonged to Titus under his mother's will ran through the proceedings for years. He was buried in 1669 in an unmarked grave; she had been buried in the Oude Kerk, and he had sold her plot years earlier to raise money, which is the whole of the story in one transaction.

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