Portrait of the Three Regentesses of the Leprozenhuis, Amsterdam

In the late 1660s three women ran Amsterdam's leper house, a charitable institution of the city, and the museum can name them. Clara Abba, Elisabeth van Duynen and Agatha Munter sit at a table set with the tools of the job, an account book, an inkwell and coins. Their work was practical. Regentesses like these oversaw the staff and the buying of supplies. Amsterdam's charities commissioned group portraits of their governors to hang in their own boardrooms, and this one was painted for the leper house and later passed to the city, which still owns it. The museum dates it between 1668 and about 1671 and sees a second, unknown hand beside Bol's. Bol signed and dated it 1668 at the lower right, on the foot stove, the little wooden box holding a pot of hot coals that Dutch women kept under their skirts in cold rooms.