Frans Hals, 'Portrait of a Middle-Aged Woman with Hands Folded', about 1635-40

The sitter looms out of this painting in a rather imposing way. She fills much more of the picture space than do the figures in most of Frans Hals’s portraits – these usually allow their subjects rather more room to breathe. However, since it was first made the picture seems to have been cut down at the sides and the bottom, amplifying the sense of the sitter’s size relative to the framing of the portrait. The impression we get today may be different to Hals’s original design.

But Hals was clearly always concerned with underlining the sitter’s rather solid appearance. The pose alone does this: by setting her hands in her lap and her forearms at right angles in front of her body, Hals has created a wide base for her triangular form. And within that triangle, he has focused on broad, sweeping curves – the roundness of her shoulders, the circular white ruff, the curling frame of her bonnet and the swell of her double chin. This sense of roundness and solidity also underpins an impression of impassive self control in the sitter. Her hands rest easily one over the other and she looks down on the viewer from a slight height. The soft light, the lack of sharp shadows and the muted palette of browny blacks and greyish white also contribute to the atmosphere of calm composure (though some of this may have been caused by the ageing of the paint).

Unfortunately we don’t know the identity of this apparently composed and collected woman. Like nearly all of Hals’s subjects, she is surely a citizen of Haarlem, the town where he lived and worked for most of his professional life. Although she is not wearing – or at least showing – betrothal or wedding rings, past attempts to identify her have included suggestions that this may be one half of a marriage portrait. Couples typically commissioned two separate paintings to be hung together as pendants; it has even been suggested that this may be pendant to a Portrait of a Man in his Thirties or Portrait of a Man holding a Book (private collection). But there is no supporting documentation, and uncertainties over the original sizes of all three paintings also undermine such speculation (marriage pendants would have been the same size).

We also can’t be sure of the date of the picture: none is marked on the canvas. Sometimes the style of dress can be used as a dating aid, but it isn’t reliable for older sitters because – as they might today – some men and women continued to wear the fashions of their youth as they grew older. The costume we see here was in vogue in the early 1630s, though the large and cumbersome millstone ruff was still being worn by women in Haarlem in the mid- to late 1630s – see Portrait of a Woman (Marie Larp?) – and even into the 1640s.