Frans Hals, 'Portrait of Marie Larp', about 1635

An eighteenth-century label stuck on the back of this painting identifies the sitter as Marie Larp. It forms a pendant to the portrait of her husband, the Haarlem silk dyer Pieter Tjarck. The pair must have commissioned their portraits from Frans Hals soon after their wedding in 1634, when Hals was at the height of his career as Haarlem’s most eminent portrait painter. Married couples were usually depicted in this way, each in a separate painting and turned towards each other. They were then hung together with the man to the left and the woman to the right.

Marie Larp is shown seated in an upright position within a fictive oval frame, looking directly at the viewer while resting her left hand on her chest. This hand gesture may reciprocate the affection of her husband (who is depicted holding a rose symbolising the love for his wife), indicating that love resides in the heart. However, the gesture also draws attention to her faultless posture and the rich embroidery on her gown. While the stark black and white of her costume might at first suggest sober restraint, closer examination reveals luxurious and costly details. Hals’s fluid brushwork records the varied textures of fine linen, thick gold embroidery and delicate lace, and imparts a pleasant, personable character to the sitter’s rosy-cheeked face.

Contemporary documents show that Larp was married twice and died in 1675, about forty years after this portrait was made. The first of those marriages was in 1634 to Pieter Dircksz. Tjarck. Their only son, Nicolaas, was born a year later. Hals’s portrait of Pieter Tjarck – on loan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – is near identical in size as the National Gallery painting and set in a similar, grey-green, oval-shaped painted frame. It too has a label on the back written in an eighteenth-century hand, which identifies the sitter as Tjarck.

Tjarck and Larp’s pendant portraits remained in the family, being passed down through the generations. They stayed together until the late nineteenth century, when they were sold separately at an auction in Paris. The portrait of Marie Larp eventually entered the collection of the National Gallery in 1972, while that of Pieter Tjarck was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1974. Thanks to LACMA’s generous loan, they have now been reunited for the first time since then.