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. He lived and worked in Haarlem, a city in which the local authority of the day frowned on religious painting in places of worship but citizens liked to decorate thei ...

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 language, English) is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the Provinces of the Nether ...

cloth merchant Joseph Coymans 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 ( ) was a period in the history of the Netherlands which roughly lasted from 1588, when the Dutch Republic was established, to 1672, when the '' Rampjaar'' occurred. During this period, Dutch trade, scientific development ...

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 nec ...

, 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 A diadem is a Crown (headgear), crown, specifically an ornamental headband worn by monarchs and others as a badge of Monarch, royalty. Overview The word derives from the Ancient Greek, Greek διάδημα ''diádēma'', "band" or "fillet", fro ...

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 J ...

'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 ''Haarlems Dagblad'' is a regional newspaper in Haarlem, Netherlands. It claims to be the oldest newspaper in the world still in printed circulation, although it was forced to merge with another Haarlem-based newspaper during the German occ ...

The couple lived after their marriage at Koningstraat 18 in Haarlem, which still exists as a protected

rijksmonument A (, ) 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 had 61,822 l ...

. 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