Saskia van Uylenburgh

Saskia van Uylenburgh (August 2, 1612 – June 14, 1642) was the wife of painter Rembrandt van Rijn. In the course of her life she was his model for some of his paintings, drawings and etchings. She was the daughter of a Frisian mayor.

Asteroid 461 Saskia is named in her honour.

Saskia was born in Leeuwarden, Friesland, the youngest of the eight children of Sjoukje Ozinga and Rombertus van Uylenburgh, a top lawyer, a town burgomaster, and one of the founders of the University of Franeker. Saskia (called Saske in Friesland) was orphaned by age 12, as her mother died in 1619 and her father five years later. Supposedly she met Rembrandt at the home of her uncle, Hendrick van Uylenburgh, a painter and art dealer who had emigrated from Friesland to Kraków in Poland with his parents but decided in 1625 to move to the Dutch Republic, where there was growing tolerance after the death of Maurice of Orange.

Saskia was raised by her sister Hiskje and her husband, Gerard van Loo, a lawyer and secretary in the grietenij Het Bildt. For a while she lived in Franeker when her sister Antje was ill. After Antje's burial, Saskia assisted her brother-in-law, the Polish theology professor Johannes Maccovius, until she married Rembrandt in 1634.

In 1631 and in the company of the Mennonite painters Govert Flinck and Jacob Backer, Saskia traveled to Amsterdam. There she met Rembrandt, who produced paintings and portraits for Uylenburgh's Amsterdam clients. In turn Rembrandt travelled to Leeuwarden, where he was received by the painter Wybrand de Geest, who had married Saskia's niece.

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