Old Woman Sleeping, Rembrandt van Rijn, c. 1636
etching, h 69mm × w 52mm More details
Is this a man or a woman? In the early 18th century the sitter was taken for a dozing man, but later it was thought to be a woman. Rembrandt here takes up the 17th-century genre of pious old women who have fallen asleep while reading the Bible, still holding their reading spectacles.
