This arresting portrait has a sliver of painted frame to suggest that the sitter’s fan is projecting into our space. George IV acquired it for the considerable sum of 800 guineas (£840), late in his collecting career, soon after Rubens’s Portrait of a Woman, valued at the same rate. Acquisitions like this mark Rembrandt’s ‘arrival’ as an Old Master admired among the greatest names.

Purchased in 1819