In 1654 the Amsterdam church council summoned Hendrickje Stoffels, who kept Rembrandt's house and had his child. She admitted living with him unmarried and was barred from communion. Rembrandt was never summoned. He had never joined the Reformed church, so the council had no hold on him at all.
Why they never married
Rembrandt's wife Saskia had died in 1642, and her will is the whole explanation. He had the use of her money only for as long as he stayed unmarried. Marrying Hendrickje would have cost him the inheritance, so he did not marry her.
Their daughter Cornelia was baptised in the Oude Kerk on 30 October 1654, three months or so after the council had finished with her mother. The following year Titus, Rembrandt's son by Saskia, turned fourteen and made a will naming his father as sole heir, which removed the money as a reason.
Rembrandt still did not marry her. She stayed nine more years, ran the household, sat for him, and died on 21 July 1663. She was buried in a rented grave in the Westerkerk.
The household that had to employ him
In 1656 he filed for insolvency. The house on the Jodenbreestraat, the collection of shells and armour and prints, the lot was inventoried and sold off, and the house itself went at foreclosure in February 1658.
What happened next is the strangest document in the story. In 1660 Hendrickje and Titus set up a company as art dealers, and Rembrandt signed on as their employee, working for board and lodging. His partner and his teenage son now owned the business, and the most famous painter in Amsterdam was staff.
It was a legal arrangement, and the point of it was to keep the pictures he had not yet painted out of reach of the people he owed. He went on working like that for the rest of his life.
Whose face is it
Flora is the Roman goddess of flowers and of spring, and Rembrandt had painted her before — twice in the 1630s, with Saskia dressed up in the costume and the flowers in her hair. The canvas in New York was painted around 1654.
Everyone has wanted it to be Hendrickje, because of the year. The Metropolitan Museum's own record points the other way and says the goddess may be based in part on a portrait of his late wife, twelve years dead by then. No undisputed likeness of Hendrickje has ever been identified, which is why the argument has nowhere to land.
So the woman in flowers, painted in the year the church read Hendrickje Stoffels her charge, may be her and may be the wife whose will was the reason she was there to be charged.
The church minutes name Hendrickje Stoffels. The painting puts her in flowers and names nobody at all.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.