Support The single, oval, vertically grained, quarter-sawn oak plank is approx. 1 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks, as well as intersecting compass scribe marks in the centre related to the construction of the oval shape. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1617. The plank could have been ready for use by 1628, but a date in or after 1634 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, warm, cream-coloured ground extends up to the edges of the support. It contains a mixture of what appear to be lead white particles, which are coarser than in the pendant (SK-A-1784), orange and fine black pigment particles. Though the composition of the ground is similar to that found on the pendant, its appearance is darker.
Underdrawing Sparse, dark lines in a dry medium are visible to the naked eye and even more clearly with infrared photography. These mark the contours of the face, the facial features and the cap. The tip of the nose, the mouth, and the sitter’s left eye were placed lower than in the painted version.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, reserving the figure, hair and cap. The ground shows through the thin, translucent paint layers. The background was executed loosely. The cap, face, collar, hands and gloves were undermodelled in various shades of grey, most clearly seen in the collar. The thin, pale flesh tones were applied in opaque, wet-in-wet strokes with brown shadows above the eyelids, beneath the nose and between the hands and fingers. The black clothing appears to be underpainted in a dark grey, with reserves for the collar and hands, the sitter’s right hand slightly extending beyond it. All colour transitions were abutted carefully. There are minute stipple accents in the white highlights of the collar at the shoulder and in the rows of beads on the dress. The latter’s reserve was wider than the painted version, as can be seen on its right, and the sitter’s right arm and left hand seem initially to have been positioned somewhat lower and further to the left.
Gwen Tauber [publication date 2026]

Fair. An old crack at the lower right corresponds to a knot in the reverse. The paint layer is abraded in the background and collar, in the latter area to such an extent that the neck is now exposed and the top of the collar appears as a separate item of clothing. There are small, discoloured retouchings throughout.

For both the present painting (SK-A-1785) and its pendant (SK-A-1784)
? Commissioned by or for the sitters; ? their daughter, Helena van der Schalcke (1646-1671), Haarlem; ? her husband, Nicolaes Eichelberg (?-1699), Amsterdam; ? his daughter, Agneta Eichelberg (1671-1749), Amsterdam; ? her daughter, Helena Overbeek (1711-1756), Amsterdam; ? her daughter, Agneta Wittemeyer (1732-1793), Amsterdam; ? her daughter, Catharina Helena Bardon (1754-1807), Amsterdam; ? her daughter, Catharina Paulina van Driest (1798-1856), Amsterdam; ? her son, Hendrik Christiaan Kleinpenning (1834-1904), Leiden;¹¹Provenance reconstructed in H.L. Kruimel, ‘Rondom de Van der Schalcke-portretten van Gerard Ter Borch’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 25 (1971), pp. 224-29, esp. pp. 224, 229.…; from Francke Gallery, Amsterdam, with SK-A-1786, fl. 575, to the museum, with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1898

Object number: SK-A-1785

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

From the time this portrait and its companion piece (SK-A-1784; also fig. a) by Gerard ter Borch entered the museum in 1898, the sitters were long thought to have been Hendrick van der Schalcke and his wife.⁹⁹S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, II, The Hague 1960, p. 68, nos. 28, 29. That incorrect identification was based on old, probably mid-nineteenth-century labels on the backs of both works. The last private owner, Hendrik Christiaan Kleinpenning, was also in possession of Ter Borch’s portrait of Helena van der Schalcke,¹⁰¹⁰SK-A-1786. and believed that Hendrick van der Schalcke and his wife were her parents. However, genealogical research has shown that she was in fact the daughter of Gerard Abrahamsz van der Schalcke and Johanna Bardoel, and they are the people depicted in these pendants.¹¹¹¹H.L. Kruimel, ‘Rondom de Van der Schalcke-portretten van Gerard Ter Borch’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 25 (1971), pp. 224-29, esp. pp. 224-25.

Gerard van der Schalcke was a Haarlem merchant and cloth dealer. The prenuptial agreement for his marriage to Johanna Bardoel was drawn up on 25 May 1645, with the wedding taking place on 20 June. Since the painting of the man is dated 1644, it can be assumed that the undated one of the woman was made concurrently. Her dress is in the style of the mid-1640s.¹²¹²For example, compare Johannes Verspronck’s Portrait of Adriana Croes, which is dated 1644 (SK-A-4998). Her husband is wearing a hat, which became fashionable in Dutch portraiture after 1640.¹³¹³R.E.O. Ekkart, Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck: Leven en werken van een Haarlems portretschilder uit de 17de eeuw, Haarlem 1979, p. 47. The gloves that both sitters are holding are sometimes associated with marital fidelity in companion pieces of married couples, but were at any rate status symbols.¹⁴¹⁴D.R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture, Ann Arbor 1982, p. 78.

Dendrochronology revealed that the two panels came from different trees. There are, as well, minor technical differences, such as the ground layer of the woman’s portrait, which is slightly darker in tone. Otherwise the execution is very closely related; for example, they were both prepared in the same way with an underdrawing in a dry medium outlining the facial features.¹⁵¹⁵See Technical notes.

These two faces, which are modelled in a far livelier way than in the few rather stiff full-lengths that preceded them around 1640, are a milestone in Ter Borch’s artistic development.¹⁶¹⁶S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, I, The Hague 1959, p. 47. At about the same time he painted companion pieces of Jan Bardoel and Maria Wybouts, the brother and sister-in-law of Johanna Bardoel.¹⁷¹⁷Present whereabouts unknown. See S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, II, The Hague 1960, p. 69, nos. 32, 33 (as unidentified portraits). They are listed in the couple’s probate inventory of 20 February 1663; see Van Thiel-Stroman in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, p. 300, note 16. Ter Borch also depicted them at three-quarter length, which was more conventional than his former full-lengths.¹⁸¹⁸S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, II, The Hague 1960, pp. 61-63, nos. 16-19. See A. McNeil Kettering, ‘Gerard ter Borch’s Portraits for the Deventer Elite’, Simiolus 27 (1999), pp. 46-69. In the first half of the 1640s the Haarlem artist Johannes Verspronck produced female portraits which, despite being life-sized, are related to Ter Borch’s likeness of Johanna Bardoel in their composition, restrained gesticulation and sense of poise.¹⁹¹⁹See, for example, R.E.O. Ekkart, Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck: Leven en werken van een Haarlems portretschilder uit de 17de eeuw, Haarlem 1979, p. 165, no. 41, p. 166, no. 45. The portraits by Hendrick Gerritsz Pot, also of Haarlem, influenced Ter Borch, as can be seen from a comparison with two oval pendants attributed to him which were in the Steinmeier Collection in Luzern in 1919.²⁰²⁰Photo RKD. See also the pendants of Jean Fontaine and his wife in The Hague, Mauritshuis; illustrated in Q. Buvelot (ed.), Portraits in the Mauritshuis 1430-1790, coll. cat. The Hague 2004, pp. 301, 302, nos. 1075, 1076. Ter Borch was probably living in Amsterdam in the years prior to making these works, and it is possible that he or his patron had Haarlem portraiture in mind when he painted the four likenesses. The commission from Haarlem is certainly not inexplicable, since Ter Borch had trained there and enrolled in the city’s Guild of St Luke in 1635. In addition, Susanne de Molijn, a sister of Ter Borch’s Haarlem teacher Pieter de Molijn, married Hendrick Cornelisz van der Schalcke in 1637, making her an aunt of Gerard van der Schalcke.²¹²¹H.L. Kruimel, ‘Rondom de Van der Schalcke-portretten van Gerard Ter Borch’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 25 (1971), pp. 224-29, esp. p. 225.

Gerbrand Korevaar [publication date 2026]

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

For both the present painting (SK-A-1785) and its pendant (SK-A-1784)
E. Plietzsch, Gerard ter Borch, Vienna 1944, pp. 12, 39, nos. 11, 12; S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, I, The Hague 1959, p. 47; ibid., II, 1960, p. 68, nos. 28, 29; H.L. Kruimel, ‘Rondom de Van der Schalcke-portretten van Gerard Ter Borch’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 25 (1971), pp. 224-29

For both the present painting (SK-A-1785) and its pendant (SK-A-1784)
1903, p. 57, nos. 571, 572 (as Portraits of Hendrick van der Schalcke or Schalckenius and his Wife); 1934, p. 55, nos. 571, 572 (as Portraits of Hendrick van der Schalcke or Schalckenius and his Wife); 1960, p. 48, nos. 571, 572 (as Hendrick van der Schalcke or Schalckenius and his Wife); 1976, p. 130, nos. A 1784, A 1785

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2026, 'Gerard ter (II) Borch, Portrait of Johanna Bardoel (1603-after 1667), c. 1644', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200108272