Circle of Frans Hals

Circle of is the loosest of the attribution labels. It says a picture was made close to a master, in his town and in his manner, by a hand that cannot be named with confidence. The Louvre uses it for this portrait of Catharina Both van der Eem.

In December 1619 she married Paulus van Beresteyn, a Haarlem lawyer, as his third wife, and around 1620 the couple were painted as a matching pair. His portrait is given to Frans Hals himself. Hers was plainly designed to hang beside it, but the museum judges it the work of a less skilled collaborator from Hals's circle.

In 1989 the German Hals scholar Claus Grimm proposed Pieter Soutman, a Haarlem painter who had worked with Rubens in Antwerp, and the Louvre records that name with a question mark. The date 1629 under her coat of arms has been partly repainted, and the museum does not trust it. Both portraits hung for generations in the Hofje van Beresteyn, a Haarlem almshouse founded by the couple's son, and the Louvre bought them from its regents in 1885.