Retrato de uma mulher

Frans Hals painted this woman in Haarlem in 1627, the same year he finished one of his great group portraits of the town's civic-guard officers gathered at their banquet. We do not know her name. What the picture records instead is her age, inscribed on the plain background, she was 33, and her standing, in black satin with a stiff milled ruff and fine lace cuffs. Hals worked faster and looser than most portraitists of the Dutch Republic, and you can see it in the bodice. The decoration on the black is laid down in quick grey slashes that only resolve into embroidery when you step back. She was probably painted as one of a pair, though the companion portrait, likely her husband, has never been identified.