Abraham de Visscher was baptized on 10 February 1605 in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam as the eldest son of an Emden-born merchant of the same name and his wife Cornelia Coymans. On 13 July 1632 he married Machtelt Bas, daughter of the city’s influential regent Dirck Jacobsz Bas.6 Their marital status is mentioned on an old label on the back of the portrait.7 De Visscher was a merchant like his father, dealing mainly in cloth from Cambrai, and one of the directors of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). He died at the age of 62 in 1667 and was buried on 19 September of that year.8 Abraham de Visscher and Machtelt Bas are also included in Dirck van Santvoort’s likeness of Dirck Jacobsz Bas and his second family of around 1635,9 which confirms the identity of the man in this canvas and the woman’s in another one in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-397; also fig. a). The two paintings belong to a collection of 23 family portraits bequeathed to the museum in 1823 by Johanna Balguerie-van Rijswijck.10 As happened with other pictures in the group, the sitters’ coats of arms were added in the eighteenth century.11 Both portraits have been assigned to Abraham van den Tempel in the museum’s catalogues since 1880,12 but were in the recent past transferred to Jacob Backer on convincing stylistic grounds by Van den Brink.13 The lighting, the background with the red curtain and the virtuoso imitation of textures in De Visscher’s likeness have distinct parallels in Backer’s monogrammed Portrait of a Man in Kassel.14 They are among the artist’s very last output. The clothing points to a date around 1650,15 and the unfinished state of Bas’s picture, in particular,16 could be due to Backer’s sudden death in 1651. De Visscher’s portrait, on the other hand, is in a far more advanced state. Van den Brink suggested that a vista of a landscape still had to be added to the background to match the one in Bas’s likeness, which he regarded as completed.17 However, the artist took great care over the subtle lighting around the man’s contours which, like Backer’s aforementioned picture in Kassel, is remarkable in its contribution to the spatial effect, which does indicate that the work is finished. In addition, Backer is known to have given pendant pairs different backgrounds.18 The descriptions of both portraits in the museum’s collection catalogues suggest that there was a considerable change in their sizes between 1887 and 1897, and that the painting of Machtelt Bas was even given a different support.19 Since the two works display not a trace of such drastic alterations, the data must have been wrong from the outset. It is also remarkable that they were listed as pendants only in 1880, having been catalogued separately before then. This may have been due to the striking difference in the state of finish and in the size of the sitters, for De Visscher takes up more of the picture space than Bas does. Gerbrand Korevaar, 2023 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements