Portrait of a Woman

Entry

This bust-length pendant pair is remarkable for the nonchalant pose of the husband (SK-A-1246) in comparison to the more formal one of his wife (shown here). The man sits sideways in his chair with one arm resting on its back and the other planted in his side. Hals first used this pose in his 1626 Portrait of a Man, Probably Isaac Abrahamsz Massa.⁸ By association the viewer assumes that the woman in the pendant pair is, like her husband, seated, although no chair is to be seen. The husband’s informal pose is matched by the looser handling of the paint in his portrait. Similar to the sketchy treatment apparent in Hals’s genre paintings, the ground has been left visible in many places and the strokes with which the lace was rendered have a dashed-off quality. The spontaneity with which Hals seems to have rendered the man’s likeness is accentuated by the fact that his right hand is painted right up to the canvas edge. The deep cusping on this side of the canvas indicates that the painting has not been cut down here. It is, therefore, as if Hals was working so fast he temporarily lost track of his composition. Stylistically and on the basis of the sitters’ clothing the pendants can be dated to the mid-1630s. The woman’s cap, for example, and millstone ruff with neerstik (the lace fringe hanging below it) have a close parallel in Hals’s 1634 Portrait of Catharina Brugman.⁹

The Hals pendants were the most prized among the group of 36 portraits given to the Rijksmuseum by Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll in 1885. In a letter outlining the donation to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Obreen suggested, apparently as the first scholar to do so, an identification for the male sitter: ‘Portrait of a man (possibly Nicolaes Hasselaer)’.¹⁰ An Amsterdam citizen, Nicolaes Hasselaer (1593-1635) took part in a mission to Moscow in 1616 and is recorded as a brewer in Amsterdam in 1619. In 1622, he became a regent of the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage and in January 1626 took over as Captain-Major of the Amsterdam troops.¹¹ The reason why Obreen did not identify the female sitter is probably because only the identity of Hasselaer’s first wife, Geertruid van Erp, was known at the time. Geertruid van Erp died in 1620 which would have excluded her as a potential candidate. This, at least, was the reason given by Hofstede de Groot in 1910 for rejecting the Nicolaes Hasselaer identification.¹² Reiterating an identification of the couple that had already been made by Bredius in the 1887 catalogue of the Rijksmuseum’s collection, he put forward Nicolaes’s brother Dirck Hasselaer (1581-1645) and his wife as more likely candidates. Hofstede de Groot’s alternative suggestion, however, was equally untenable, as Dirck Hasselaer’s wife, Brechtje van Schoterbosch, died in 1618. Moreover, secure portraits of that couple by Cornelis van der Voort (SK-A-1242 and SK-A-1243), which were also donated to the Rijksmuseum by Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll in 1885, rule that possibility out beyond a shadow of a doubt.

A year prior to Hofstede de Groot’s suggestion Moes had already tentatively identified the female sitter as Nicolaes Hasselaer’s second wife, Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen (1594-1667).¹³ With the exception of Hofstede de Groot, the sitters have been regarded in the literature since Moes as Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen, albeit sometimes only tentatively. One of the major stumbling blocks is the couple’s age; Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen were in their late 30s, early 40s during the first half of the 1630s, but the couple depicted here seems to be significantly younger. The male pendant can be compared to a secure likeness of Nicolaes Hasselaer in Abraham de Vries’s 1633 group portrait of the regents of the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage.¹⁴ Hasselaer is shown in profile in De Vries’s portrait, which makes comparison difficult, but he seems to be more rotund and more mature than the man in the Rijksmuseum painting, and he seems to lack that man’s broad nose. Both men hold batons, but these were common to men in a variety of military positions.

The notion entertained by Middelkoop that the portraits were executed after Nicolaes Hasselaer’s death in 1635 does not provide a very satisfactory solution to the problem.¹⁵ Hals’s sketchy portrait of Hasselaer, according to Middelkoop’s hypothesis, was meant as an idealized representation of the sitter at a younger age. But it is not just the man who appears younger than Hasselaer was in the early 1630s. The female sitter, too, is unlikely to be a woman in her late 30s. One of the questions that arises, then, is why Hals would depict Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen in a more finished painting, if she too were being idealized. Although the male portrait is somewhat rougher than usual, Hals often rendered his male sitters in a sketchier fashion than their spouses. The loose handling of the man’s portrait therefore provides insufficient grounds to assume this work was executed after the sitter’s death.

In addition to the sitters’ ages, the line of inheritance is problematic were these portraits to show Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen.¹⁶ Were this the case, they would have been inherited by Aegje Hasselaer (1617-64), a daughter of Nicolaes Hasselaer’s brother Dirck. The portraits would have entered the Van de Poll collection by way of Aegje Hasselaer’s daughter Brechje Hooft (1640-1721), who was married to Harmen van de Poll (1641-73). Rather than going to a daughter of his half-brother, such pendant portraits would more likely have been inherited by Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen’s own children, in the first place most likely by their eldest son Gerard Hasselaer (1620-73). While an inventory of his estate has not survived, or was never made, the inventory of his sister, Anna Hasselaer (1626-89), does survive, and lists a portrait of her father.¹⁷

The traditional identification of the couple in this pendant pair as Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen is not convincing. A number of the other portraits in the 1885 Van de Poll gift show citizens of Haarlem. The sitters in the present pair may well have been related to them. But while there are a few potential candidates among their number, there is a lack of documentation in the way of substantiated portraits with which to compare the likenesses, or estate inventories, rendering identification of the sitters impossible for the time being.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
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This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 107.