Frans Hals in mennonitischen Brauerkreisen: Die Porträts eines unbekannten Ehepaares im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum

To this day the sitters in Frans Hals’s portraits of a man and a 32-year-old woman (1640) in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud could not be identified. These could be the portraits mentioned in the 1676 inventory of the estate of the late Geertruijt Gerrits van Santen (1605/1610-1675), widow of the Haarlem brewer Nicolaes Noppen (1600/1605-1657). As their dress indicates, the sitters in these portraits may have been Mennonites, as were Noppen and his wife. In an 1830 auction catalogue their portraits were described as ‘life size’. The portraits in Cologne can be compared to those of Lucas de Clercq and his wife Feijntje van Steenkiste, painted by Hals in 1635, who were also Mennonites and acquainted with Noppen and his wife. The portrait of Geer - truijt Gerrits’s father, the distiller and Mennonite preacher Gerrit Jansz. van Santen (1584/1585-c.1653), also mentioned in the 1676 inventory, may be the portrait of a 56-year-old man with a cap, also from 1640, now in the collection of the Dutch State.