Portrait of a Woman

The date sits right on a change in Dutch fashion. Around 1630 the big starched cartwheel ruff this woman wears, a stiff white wheel that pushed her chin up and held her head still, was going out of style in the Dutch Republic, giving way to flatter, softer collars. To keep wearing one marked her as respectable and a little old-fashioned, the wife of a solid Haarlem household in a Calvinist town that prized restraint. Hals painted her in the sober black such families wore by choice, not poverty. Portraits like this usually came in pairs, a wife turned slightly toward the husband hung beside her, though her companion piece, if there ever was one, is unknown today. She has no name in the records either. What is left is the face and that out-of-date wheel of linen framing it.