Jan de Braij, 'Portrait of Anna Westerbaen', 1657

A woman shown in three-quarter length turns her head slightly, meeting our gaze with a stern expression. She is wearing a black peaked cap, a black dress and flat white collar that extends below her shoulders. Her restrained clothes and the dark background give this portrait a formal and rather stiff character, but Jan de Braij still managed to convey a sense of the sitter’s personality.

For years the painting was called Portrait of a Woman with a Black Cap, but we can now be certain that it shows the artist’s mother, Anna Westerbaen. The features of the woman resemble her likeness in other paintings and her age – 52 in 1657 – matches the painting’s inscription. Anna Westerbaen was the daughter of a rope maker from The Hague, and the sister of the physician and poet Jacob Westerbaen and the portrait painter Jan Westerbaen. She married the painter, architect and poet Salomon de Bray in 1625 in The Hague, and later moved to Haarlem, where she gave birth to at least ten children. She came from a Protestant family, but probably converted to Catholicism when she married the Catholic Salomon, as all her children were baptised in that denomination.

Jan, Anna’s eldest son, painted his mother’s portrait a number of times, but this is the only formal one. It’s possible that he also made a pendant portrait of his father, which is now lost. A drawing by Jan (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin) of his father that bears the same date of 1657 and a similar inscription stating the sitter’s age seems to record the companion piece. The panel may have been cut on the left, and the initials preceding the surname of the signature consequently lost. X-ray photographs show that the head was originally further to the left and that the collar was lower.

Jan de Braij was one of the most important history painters of his time, but he was also a distinguished portrait painter. After the death of Frans Hals, de Braij became the favourite portraitist of the Haarlem elite.