Portrait of Jacob Trip (c.1576-1661)

Jacob Trip's fortune came from iron and guns, and much of it through his wife's family. Margaretha de Geer was a sister of Louis de Geer, the Liège-born merchant who ran ironworks and cannon foundries in Sweden, and the Trip brothers traded Swedish metal and weapons across Europe with him. Jacob lived in Dordrecht, the town Maes came from, and the inscription at the lower left gives his age as 84.

Rembrandt also painted him in these last years, in a portrait now in the National Gallery in London, loosely brushed, the old man wrapped in a plain robe. Maes sets him up as a man of rank. Trip sits in a red upholstered armchair under a heavy red curtain, in a black gown with a broad fur lining, beside a table covered in red cloth, one hand resting on the carved arm of the chair. Before it came to the Mauritshuis in 1822, the portrait belonged to the Ministry of the Navy in The Hague.