Portrait of Catharina Brugman

Frans Hals painted this in 1634, and up in the corner he noted the sitter's age, 22, beside the date — the kind of plain record a Haarlem family expected on a marriage portrait. She is Catharina Brugman, an Amsterdam cloth merchant's daughter who had married the wealthy merchant Tieleman Roosterman three years earlier. Hals made the pair as a matched set, meant to hang side by side, so she turns slightly toward her husband, one hand resting on a chair, the other holding her gloves, dressed in the stiff lace and dark silk of the Dutch merchant class. The two portraits were later separated. His hangs today in Cleveland, hers in a private collection.