Portrait of Elisabeth Bellinghausen

For more than a century this panel was missing its other half. Bruyn painted it in 1538 or 1539 as one wing of a hinged pair made for an engagement in Cologne. Elisabeth Bellinghausen sat on one side, and on the other her fiancé Jakob Omphalius, a lawyer who lectured at the city's university. They married in 1539. At a London auction in 1896 the pair was split up. Elisabeth reached the Rijksmuseum in 1912, and her husband vanished. A Mauritshuis curator later linked the two through an old photograph and the coats of arms sketched in the 1896 sale catalogue. In May 2019 he surfaced at a small Paris auction house as a portrait of an unknown man, and the Mauritshuis bought him in 2020. The stone ledge under her hand runs on into his panel. The sprig she holds is bittersweet, a token of engagement.