A nude young woman lies propped on pillows in a canopied bed, one hand raised toward a golden light that pours in from the depths of the room. At the left an old maid in a headdress watches from between the curtains. A small gilded cherub sits on the canopy at the upper right, a pair of slippers lies on the floor, and a red cloth with a lace edge covers a table at the right. In the myth, a princess of Argos, Danaë, is shut in a tower by her father, the king, who has been warned that her unborn son will kill him; Zeus comes to her in the form of a shower of gold.

Rembrandt painted this large canvas in 1636, and a nude on this scale was unusual in Dutch painting. In the early 1640s he significantly altered its central part, so what we see is not the composition of 1636. The painting stayed in his own home for a long time and entered the Hermitage in 1772 with the Crozat collection from Paris. On June 15, 1985, a man poured acid on the canvas and cut it twice with a knife; Hermitage restorers worked until 1997 to repair it.

It is in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.