This month, we’ll be featuring Summer of Love, a four-part series on artists who painted the same individual—over and over and over again. The relationships between the two range from muse to lover to daughter, with no two cases the same.

Beloved Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt van Rijn is marking a big milestone this year: The 350th anniversary of his death. In celebration of his masterful use of light and depictions of tender human moments, his name is plastered across billboards all over the Netherlands, where almost a third of his roughly 300 paintings will be on view over the course of 2019. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam displayed every work in its collection by the artist in a show called All the Rembrandts, and the Mauritshuis is exhibiting all of its Rembrandts as well. The roughly 12-by-14-foot Night Watch (1642), one of his masterpieces, is now being conserved live in the Rijksmuseum to audiences of curious onlookers. And in Fries, an hour-and-a-half drive east of Amsterdam, an exhibition called Rembrandt and Saskia presented a portrait of the artist and his short, but meaningful, relationship with Saskia van Uylenburgh, the only woman who was ever officially Mrs. Rembrandt van Rijn.

Perhaps overdue, he’s now sharing a bit of his spotlight with the love of his life. Saskia was undoubtedly a strong presence in Rembrandt’s life, but as for which paintings she actually modeled for, the jury of art historians is still out. The total number of times Saskia’s likeness appears in Rembrandt’s work ranges between five and 12, depending on who you ask; some still like to play a three-century-old game of “spot that Saskia lookalike.”

The miller’s son and the mayor’s daughter

If Saskia grew up with a silver spoon in her mouth, Rembrandt grew up with a mouthful of malt. She was from the town of Leeuwarden, where her father was the mayor and a prominent (and rich) lawyer; he was the son of a humble miller and grew up helping his father grind malt before moving to Amsterdam to pursue a painting career. The two were not an obvious match, introduced by chance.

Saskia’s cousin, art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, had brought Rembrandt into his gallery around 1631 and was selling the artist’s highly marketable portraits. Hendrick was also housing the young painter in his four-story townhouse on the Amstel canal. When Saskia traveled to Amsterdam to visit Hendrick and another cousin in 1633, she met a twentysomething Rembrandt at Hendrick’s riverside home.

Rembrandt was working on an etched portrait of Jan Cornelis Silvius, a preacher and the husband of Saskia’s cousin. Saskia was no stranger to the arts; she was educated and savvy and had travelled to Amsterdam together with two friends who happened to be painters.

Despite the contrast in their social standing and slight age difference (Rembrandt was six years older than Saskia), the two hit it off. Within a few months, the couple got engaged in the Frisian village of Sint Annaparochie, where Rembrandt was Saskia’s plus-one for the baptism of one of her nieces. The artist depicted his beloved for the first time a few days after their engagement; her young face and loose hair peeking out from under a dramatic wide-brim hat. Underneath her image an inscription reads: “This was drawn after my wife, when she was 21 years old, the third day after we were engaged 8 June 1633.”

A year later, during the summer of 1634, the two were married in that same town and celebrated at a party hosted by Saskia’s sister.

“All Rembrandt’s ideal women look like Saskia”

The couple lived together at cousin Hendrick’s for a little while before buying the pricey townhouse next door at Jodenbreestraat 4 (now the Rembrandt House Museum). There, the artist drew, painted, and etched Saskia in between commissioned portraits of Amsterdam’s elite.

He drew her combing her hair, looking at him adoringly, seated in a courtyard, and lounging in bed (likely resting during one of her four pregnancies). He painted her adorned with flower crowns and strings of pearls. Though Rembrandt might have used her facial features as a model for historic and biblically themed paintings, only five paintings are universally confirmed to be portraits of Saskia.

During the first year of their marriage Rembrandt painted her as Flora, the Roman goddess of spring. Saskia wears a tiara lush with leaves and flowers, maybe as an embodiment of the prosperity and fertility the artist hoped their union would bring. In the portrait, she tenderly touches her hand to her torso and was, in fact, pregnant with the couple’s first child at the time (their son, Rombertus, born the following year, died in childbirth; two daughters born subsequently died in infancy as well).

Rembrandt also began a large profile portrait of Saskia soon after they wed but didn’t finish it until after she had died, a short eight years later. She’s dressed in sumptuous red velvet and gold; after she died, the artist added a pearly white ostrich feather to her hat and a sprig of rosemary to her hands. And after that, the artist didn’t paint in oils for nearly a decade (an abstention some art historians have attributed to his intense grief after Saskia’s death).

Saskia died a few months after the couple’s fourth (and only surviving) child, Titus, was born. The cause of her death was likely tuberculosis or plague. When deciding where to bury Saskia, Rembrandt didn’t place her near the graves of the couple’s three deceased children in Zuiderkerk, the Protestant church a two-minute walk from the artist’s home. Instead, and somewhat romantically, he buried her in Oude Kerk, the church outside Amsterdam where the couple had married.

And once Rembrandt picked up his paintbrushes, it’s possible that he wistfully painted Saskia again in a way. Some scholars claim that she was the inspiration for a specific facial “type” that he liked to use. “In truth, almost all Rembrandt’s ideal women look like Saskia to some extent,” writes Nathalie Maciesza of the Rembrandt House Museum, “without actually being her.”