Portrait of Pieter Tjarck

A married couple usually hung side by side, the husband on the left turning slightly toward his wife. That is how Frans Hals painted Pieter Tjarck, a silk dyer from Haarlem, around 1635. He and Marie Larp had married in 1634, and the two sat for Hals soon after the wedding, one canvas each, meant to face one another for the rest of their lives. Tjarck holds a single pink rose, an ordinary token of love and marriage at the time. The portraits stayed together for more than two centuries, until they were sold off separately at a Paris auction in the late 1800s. Marie ended up in London, at the National Gallery, and Pieter here in Los Angeles. In 2023 they were hung together again for the first time in living memory, in a Hals exhibition in London, where you could finally see the small thing Hals had built the pose around, the way Tjarck leans out of his own frame toward the woman who was no longer beside him.