Portrait of Mrs. Bodolphe

This is one half of a pair. Hals painted it in 1643 as a marriage pendant, meant to hang beside a portrait of the woman's husband, and remarkably the two are still together, now at Yale. The inscription tells us she was 72 the year it was made, which has led people to wonder whether it marked a second marriage or a fiftieth anniversary. Gone are the bright, slashing colours of Hals's younger work. Here it is all black cloth, a white ruff and a plain grey ground, the sober look that respectable Protestant Haarlem wanted from a portrait by the 1640s. Her name is really a guess. The sitter has only ever been called Mrs. Bodolphe by tradition, and who she actually was is unknown.