Portrait of a Couple in a Landscape, probably Isaac Abrahamsz Massa (1586-1643) and Beatrix van der Laen (1592-1639)

Entry

The informal seated poses and joyous demeanour of the couple in this portrait make it one of the most captivating in 17th-century Dutch art. The wife affectionately rests her right hand on her husband’s shoulder, and both regard the viewer with infectious smiles. Hals’s inspiration to show his life-size sitters at full-length seated in a garden may have come from Rubens’s Self-Portrait with Isabella Brandt in a Honeysuckle Bower from around 1609-10 (fig. a), which the Haarlem painter could have seen when he visited Antwerp in 1616. The composition of this, Frans Hals’s only double portrait of a husband and wife, is unusual, however, in that the sitters have been placed off to one side rather than in the centre of the painting. While the potential inspiration from Rubens’s portrait cannot be denied, the sitters’ poses in the present painting, their tender intimacy and left of centre placement probably developed out of Hals’s Family Portrait in a Landscape from a few years earlier.⁸

Not mere vegetation, the plants surrounding the couple probably had a symbolic function, alluding to their status as newly-weds.⁹ The central motif is the sparkling vine clinging to the tree behind and between the couple. In 16th- and 17th-century love poetry and emblematic literature this motif served as a metaphor for the steadfastness of friendship or love that could even survive past death. Just as the vine leans on the tree for support, the woman in Hals’s portrait leans on her husband. The clay pots on the right of the composition are symbols of life’s fragility and reinforce the notion that love can endure past death. Because of its clinging nature, the ivy to the right of the woman was also a familiar symbol of steadfast love and faithfulness, as well as fertility. The thistle shown prominently beside the man evolved from being considered an aphrodisiac in antiquity to a symbol for fidelity in marriage in the Renaissance, especially male fidelity as the German word for the plant, Männertreu, suggests. The placement of the man’s hand over his heart in this context takes on the meaning of swearing an oath of fidelity.

The landscape in the middleground to the right of the couple has rightly been associated with the Garden of Love. It is significant that the space occupied by the married couple in the double portrait appears separate from the garden behind. The heraldic position of the portrayed couple differs too from that of the two couples seen promenading in the distance, and while the man in the foreground wears black, the men around the fountain in the middleground wear coloured doublets. The latter are obviously still in the courtship phase of their relationships. The married couple in the foreground, on the other hand, have left this part of the garden behind them.

When the present painting was put up for sale in 1851, the sitters were identified as Frans Hals himself and his second wife, Lysbeth Reyniersdr.¹⁰ This identification was rightly dismissed by Hofstede de Groot in 1910.¹¹ A few years later Binder suggested Frans Hals’s younger brother Dirck (1591-1656) and his wife Agneta Jansdr as possible candidates.¹² They probably married in 1620 or 1621, which would make this suggestion a possibility as the portrait can be dated to the early 1620s stylistically and on the evidence of the sitters’ dress. There is, however, no undisputed portrait or self-portrait of Dirck Hals with which a comparison could be made.

This is not the case with the identification of the couple first tentatively put forward in the Rijksmuseum catalogue of 1934, once again in the 1960 catalogue and most extensively argued in a 1961 article on the painting by De Jongh and Vinken.¹³ Their candidates were Isaac Abrahamsz Massa and Beatrix van der Laen. The son of Flemish immigrants, Massa was baptized in Haarlem on 7 October 1586.¹⁴ From the age of 14 or 15 he spent eight years in Moscow, becoming an authority on Russia. Later he often travelled to Moscow again as a merchant and representative of the States-General. He was apparently also in Swedish service as a diplomatic agent, for which he was ennobled by King Gustav II Adolf in 1625. On 25 April 1622, Massa married Beatrix van der Laen (1592-1639), a daughter of a former Haarlem burgomaster.

While the date of this couple’s wedding also corresponds to the dating of the present painting, the husband has been identified as Isaac Massa on the basis of other portraits. The only substantiated portrait of Massa is a small oil sketch by Hals now in San Diego (fig. b) that served as the model for a 1635 engraving by Adriaen Matham.¹⁵ On the basis of the San Diego painting, the sitter in a 1626 portrait by Hals in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, has also been identified as Massa (fig. c).¹⁶ Complicating matters is the fact that yet another portrait by Hals was mistakenly identified as Massa’s in the past on the basis of the San Diego work.¹⁷ The Toronto portrait, however, also carries the sitter’s age of 41 years, which was the same as Massa’s in 1626. By 1626, Isaac Massa had had close personal contact with Frans Hals for at least three years as he was a witness at the baptism of Hals’s daughter Adriaentje in 1623.¹⁸ Not all scholars, however, have accepted the identification of the couple in the Rijksmuseum painting as Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen. Gudlaugsson, for example, did not find that the man resembles Massa.¹⁹ Nor did Slive, Hals’s principal modern biographer, consider the identification as Massa compelling, and questioned whether the woman looks old enough to be the 30-year-old Beatrix van der Laen.²⁰

Oddly, the painting’s provenance has not been taken into consideration in assessments of the identification. The earliest provenance for the portrait is the mention in the 1702 sale catalogue of Jan Six’s collection as ‘Man and woman, life-size, by Frans Hals’.²¹ The question why the Amsterdam patrician Jan Six should have a portrait of a Haarlem couple in his collection arises. This early provenance, however, actually lends support to the Massa/Van der Laen identification. It is well known that from 1642 Jan Six owned the estate of Elsbroek in Hillegom, a village about halfway between Haarlem and Leiden. The village to the south of Hillegom is Lisse, where Beatrix van der Laen was born and apparently spent much of her life. In the 1640s, Jan Six’s mother, Anna Wijmer purchased not only Elsbroek in Hillegom for her son Jan Six, but also properties in nearby Lisse and Noordwijkerhout. The homestead, Knappenhof in Lisse, that Anna Wijmer purchased at auction in 1640 was later inherited by her son Pieter Six (1612-80).²² Knappenhof bordered on the estate of Ter Specke, which was owned by Beatrix’s father, Gerard van der Laen (1552-1635) and later by her brothers Nicolaes (1597-1644/46) and Adriaen (1598-1681).²³ Beatrix herself owned property on Speckerlaan, bordering the Ter Specke estate, until her death in 1639.²⁴ It was also at Ter Specke that Beatrix van der Laen and Isaac Massa married in 1622.²⁵ Anna Wijmer also acquired property in Noordwijkerhout in 1644 from Beatrix’s heirs.²⁶

There is a distinct possibility therefore that Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen’s wedding portrait was acquired by Jan Six in Lisse, perhaps by way of his brother, Pieter. The painting may have hung in Lisse since it was executed. Isaac Massa may have left it there after Beatrix’s death in 1639, as he remarried less than a year later in 1640. Given Isaac Massa and especially Beatrix van der Laen’s strong ties to Lisse, one wonders as well whether the garden depicted in the Rijksmuseum painting, as fanciful and iconographically laden as it is, might not also refer to the idyllic country life that the pair led there.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

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. 104.