Portrait of Isabella Agneta Deutz (1658-1694/96)

Isabella Agneta Deutz was born in Amsterdam in 1658 into money. Her father, Jan Deutz, was a merchant and banker in the city, and her mother, Geertruid Bicker, came from one of the families that ran Amsterdam in those years. Early in 1680 she married Diederick Hoeufft, from a leading family of Dordrecht, and around that time Schalcken painted the couple as a pair of small portraits on copper. Copper gave a painter a perfectly smooth ground, with no weave of canvas and no grain of wood, and it suited the enamel-like finish Schalcken was known for. She did not have long. The couple lived in Utrecht, where she died in the mid-1690s, still in her thirties. The sources disagree on the year, which is why the title gives her death as 1694 or 1696. The portrait belongs to the Mauritshuis, and like her husband's it hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V.