Portrait of Dorothea Berck [SEP] creator
Portrait of Dorothea Berck
Portrait of Dorothea Berck is a 1644 painting by Frans Hals that is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. It depicts Dorothea Berck at age 51, the wife of the prosperous Haarlem merchant Joseph Coymans, whose portrait Hals also painted. Both paintings were executed on the occasion of their daughter Isabella's wedding, whose marriage pendants Hals also painted.
The painting, like many of Hals's portraits, is inscribed and signed, but there is no mention of the identity of the sitter
Raphael was auctioned in Amsterdam and caused a sensation, making this posture popular at that time among the sitters for portraits in the Netherlands. Hals is sure to have seen the Castiglione portrait, but it is not certain he was familiar with the Mona Lisa, though works by renaissance masters such as Titian were actively collected and studied throughout the Netherlands and neo-classicisme was on the rise at that time.
Dorothea Berck is also known in Haarlem as a hofje founder. She purchased the hofje now known as the Vrouwe- en