A man's hand rests gently on a woman's chest, hers resting over his. It's one of the tenderest gestures in all of Dutch painting, and it once made another great painter say he'd give up years of his life just to sit with it.
What you're looking at
Rembrandt painted this double portrait sometime between about 1665 and 1669, near the end of his life. The identities of the couple aren't confirmed — the painting picked up its familiar nickname later, based on a guess that it showed a Jewish couple, possibly from a Biblical or historical scene, though that reading has never been proven. What's certain is the intimacy of the gesture: his hand on her chest, hers resting protectively over his, both painted with an almost glowing warmth of color.
The devotion of another painter
During an 1885 visit to the newly opened Rijksmuseum, Vincent van Gogh told a friend who was with him that he would give ten years of his life to sit in front of this painting for two weeks, with nothing to eat but a crust of dry bread — a remark from that day at the museum, not a letter, but one that has been quoted ever since. It's an extraordinary thing for one artist to say about another's work, and it points to what makes this painting so powerful nearly 400 years later: the sheer physical richness of Rembrandt's paint, built up in thick, glowing layers of red and gold, applied with a freedom that later painters, van Gogh included, found almost impossible to look away from.
One detail to look for
Look closely at the sleeve of the man's costume, where Rembrandt loaded the paint on so thickly it almost becomes sculpture rather than a flat picture. That thick paint, called impasto, is part of what gives the whole painting its glowing, almost tactile warmth.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original — 121.5 x 166.5 cm — so what you're hanging is honestly scaled to the painting Rembrandt made. Shop the canvas print.