Portrait of Dorothea Wasserhuhn, Wife of Peter Ryff

This portrait was never meant to hang alone. In 1625 Sarburgh painted Dorothea Wasserhuhn and, as its companion piece, her husband Peter Ryff, so the two would face each other as a married couple. Ryff was a fixture of Basel's university, its professor of mathematics for more than 40 years, and also a working physician and a chronicler of the city; the inscription on his portrait gives his age that year as 72. Sarburgh was the portraitist that well-off Basel families turned to in the 1620s, and an old professor's household was exactly that kind of commission. Ryff died four years later, in 1629, and these paired likenesses are among the few things that still fix the couple's faces.