Maarten van Heemskerck’s two portraits of women spinning

ILJA M. VELDMAN

The Rijksmuseum’s 1529 portrait of a woman at her spinning wheel is regarded as one of the highlights in the oeuvre of Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574). Forming a pair with a painting of her husband, it is among the earliest examples of an autonomous bourgeois portrait in the northern Netherlands.