A showstopper is at the heart of this winning show: Dulwich Gallery’s Reframed – The Woman in the Window reviewed

Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to the general public. But with Reframed: The Woman in the Window Dulwich Picture Gallery is on to a winner, as not only is the particular picture a showstopper, but the theme opens up a whole can of feminist worms.

Whether it’s her pensive pose, her idle fiddling with her necklace or the shy look in her shadowed eyes, Rembrandt’s ‘Girl at a Window’ (1645) is impossible to walk past. Scholars continue to bicker about her status. Serving wench? Kitchen maid? Prostitute? Rembrandt’s lover? Whoever she was, hers was the face that launched a thousand paintings of w-in-ws after Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou took up the motif and Dou’s pupil Gabriel Metsu followed suit. But the theme goes back a long way before Rembrandt. The earliest windows to appear in art in a fresco at Mycenae dating from the 15th century BC have women at them, and the earliest window in this show is a 9th century BC ivory panel from Nimrud with the head of a woman – possibly one of the ‘sacred prostitutes’ Herodotus writes about – framed in it.