Portrait of Sara Andriesdr Hessix

Sara Andriesdr Hessix married Michiel Jansz van Middelhoven, a preacher from Voorschoten near Leiden, in 1586. 40 years later the two of them sat to Frans Hals, who worked in Haarlem, and that anniversary is the likeliest reason for the order. They got a matching pair of life-size half-lengths, both carried out by Hals himself rather than by his workshop, which put them at the expensive end of what he offered. Seven of their sons became preachers as well.

The two canvases were separated first by the art market and then by the war. The husband's portrait had gone into the Paris collection of Adolphe Schloss, hundreds of Dutch and Flemish pictures gathered in the 1890s. When war came the Schloss paintings were hidden in a château in the Corrèze, in central France, and they were tracked down and seized in April 1943. Most of them have never resurfaced, his among them.

Hers went another way, through the collection of the merchant August de Ridder, sold in Paris in 1924, and then to Calouste Gulbenkian. It is number 214 in his museum in Lisbon.