Frans Hals - Portrait d'Isabella Coymans

Isabella Coymans (1626 – 1689), was the Dutch wife of Stephanus Geraerdts best known for her portrait painted by

Frans Hals Frans Hals the Elder (, , ; – 26 August 1666) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, chiefly of individual and group portraits and of genre works, who lived and worked in Haarlem. Hals played an important role in the evolution of 17th-century group ...

Biography

Cover of Seymour Slive catalog of Frans Hals paintings in 1989

She was the wealthy daughter of the

Haarlem Haarlem (; predecessor of ''Harlem'' in English) is a city and municipality in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of North Holland. Haarlem is situated at the northern edge of the Randstad, one of the most populated metropoli ...

cloth merchant

Joseph Coymans Joseph Coymans (1591 – ca 1653), was a Dutch businessman in Haarlem, known best today for his portrait painted by Frans Hals, and its pendant, '' Portrait of Dorothea Berck''. The former resides at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the l ...

and Dorothea Berck. She chose as her husband Stephanus Geraerdts, who was a member of the Haarlem regency, and married him in 1644. Frans Hals painted an unusual pair of wedding portraits for them, showing Isabella in an active state of presenting her husband with a rose, with only half of the rose showing in the painting. She is standing, and her husband is seated with his hand outstretched in a passive state of expectation. Though many pendant wedding portraits from the

Dutch Golden Age The Dutch Golden Age ( nl, Gouden Eeuw ) was a period in the history of the Netherlands, roughly spanning the era from 1588 (the birth of the Dutch Republic) to 1672 (the Rampjaar, "Disaster Year"), in which Dutch trade, science, and Dutch art, ...

have since been split up, this particular pair of portraits, that have been split up since 1886, receive the most commentary about this fact in the documentation.Catalog numbers 130 & 131,

, by Seymour Slive (editor), with contributions by Pieter Biesboer, Martin Bijl, Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks, Michael Hoyle, Frances S. Jowell, Koos Levy-van Halm and Liesbeth Abraham, Bianca M. Du Mortier, Irene van Thiel-Stroman, Prestel-Verlag, Munich & Mercatorfonds, Antwerp, 1989, Hals certainly never gave any other woman so much action in a portrait painting. Her hair is also loose on her shoulders, and she is wearing a

décolletage Cleavage is the narrow depression or hollow between the breasts of a woman. The superior portion of cleavage may be accentuated by clothing such as a low-cut neckline that exposes the division, and often the term is used to describe the low neck ...

, though modest. Most of Hals's female sitters were buttoned up to the chin or wearing a box collar, and had their hair behind a Dutch ladies' diadem or cap. Her portrait featured on the cover of

Seymour Slive Seymour Slive (September 15, 1920 – June 14, 2014) was an American art historian, who served as director of the Harvard Art Museums from 1975 to 1984. Slive was a scholar of Dutch art, specifically of the artists Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Ja ...

's Frans Hals catalogue of the 1989 international Frans Hals exhibition, though these portraits were only shown in Haarlem and in London and did not travel to Washington D.C. That exhibition was the first time the portraits were seen hanging side-by-side since they were split up, and they haven't been seen together since.Frans Hals Museum has Stephan on loan, but where is Isabella?
in Haarlems Dagblad The couple lived after their marriage at Koningstraat 18 in Haarlem, which still exists as a protected

rijksmonument A rijksmonument (, ) is a national heritage site of the Netherlands, listed by the agency Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE) acting for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. At the end of February 2015, the Netherlands ...

. File:Haarlem - Koningstraat 18.jpg, Koningstraat 18 in Haarlem File:Frans Hals - Stephanus Geraerdts and Isabella Coymans - WGA11159.jpg, The pendants together The art historian

Cornelis Hofstede de Groot Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (9 November 1863 – 14 April 1930), was a Dutch art collector, art historian and museum curator. Life He was born in Dwingeloo and spent some time in Switzerland in his youth due to weak lungs, where he learned German ...

mixed Isabella's portrait provenance with a weak copy that was shown at the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909. Called ''The Lady with the Rose'', the copyist included the whole rose instead of the cut version. Since being sold in 1866, Stephan has remained in the Antwerp Museum, and Isabella has remained in the Paris Rothschild collection. In 1962 the Frans Hals Museum had a large-scale exhibition of Hals paintings and Stephan was included, but the museum was so disappointed that Isabella couldn't come that they gave her a catalog number anyway and included a photograph as illustration for Stephan's portrait.Catalog numbers 62 & 63, ''Frans Hals: Exhibition on the Occasion of the Centenary of the Municipal Museum at Haarlem, 1862-1962'', page 70, publication Frans Hals Museum, 1962

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Coymans, Isabella 1626 births 1689 deaths Frans Hals People from Haarlem