Portrait of Dorothea Berck

Frans Hals painted this in 1644, and it was never meant to hang alone. Dorothea Berck, 51 here, was the wife of Joseph Coymans, a prosperous cloth merchant in Haarlem, and Hals painted the couple as a matched pair, probably to mark their daughter Isabella's wedding. Look at her hands: she holds one glove and has slipped the other off. Her husband, in his own portrait now in Hartford, holds the matching glove. It was a quiet visual code in Dutch marriage portraits for the vow that bound the two of them. Hals had spent his career painting Haarlem's merchant class like this, catching them mid-gesture rather than posed stiff. She meets your eye with the composed, faintly guarded look of someone well used to sitting for her portrait.