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.

The painting, like many of Hals's portraits, is inscribed and signed, but there is no mention of the identity of the sitter, and it was only identified as Berck in 1908.

The loose brushwork is typical of Hals and shows a fleeting gesture with the casual way her finger is hooked over her wrist.

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-classicism was on the rise at that time.

Detail of her hands