Portrait of Anna Hooftman (1613-after 1645)

This portrait is tiny, less than 19 centimetres tall, and it was never meant to hang alone. Around 1633 the Amsterdam merchant Jean Fontaine, then 25, married Anna Hooftman, who was 20, and the couple had Hendrick Pot paint them as a pair. His panel hangs on the left, hers on the right, and both are still in their original oval frames, painted to look like marble. The two portraits probably passed down in the family and then to their Calkoen heirs, until Baron Abraham Calkoen left them to the Dutch state in 1966. They have been in the Mauritshuis since 1987 and have belonged to it since 2010. Of Anna herself the title tells as much as the records do. She was born in 1613, and all that is known of her death is that it came after 1645.